Love is Innocent

While driving home after shopping at Target and Marshall's, I was listening to Colin Hay's solo venture, Man @ Work. I highly recommend it if you loved the 80s Aussie band, Men at Work. His acoustic rendition of Overkill and Land Down Under are absolutely sublime. One of the tracks is Love is Innocent. It led me to think about what a bad rap LOVE gets from the world. It's not isolated to specific locales. It surrounds us, but love isn't to blame. Love is innocent! ... People? Not so much.

I resent the number of times I've heard (personally and second hand) the phrase, 'If you love me ... " What a haphazard, horrific means of abusing the one pure thing the world has to share! For one reason or another it is we humans who've perverted the idea of love. It's not a recent occurance, either. It's as old as time. So, why is it so hard to put a little love in our hearts? Pride, perhaps? Fear? We're all too often left saying, "love,look what you've done to me!"

Maybe Hollywood should be blamed. Love is supposed to be difficult, right? No relationship is worth having if you don't have to fight tooth and nail for it ... if you're not giving up something, then there's no liveliness, right? How could something that comes so naturally and easily be passionate? In virtually every movie where a romantic relationship is involved, there is a major struggle for the couple to come together ... love is a battlefield. It's the dynamic that makes the movie worth watching. We root for the underdog and hope there will be a happily ever after. It's a movie. A script for which the actors to follow. I repeat: a movie! I don't know about you, but I don't have a script to follow with a director telling me how to deliver the lines.

The catalyst that brings me to the Hollywood interference reference comes from a letter I read that was sent to a friend by a former significant other. Had I not known better, I would have assumed it was retrieved from one of those form letter websites. It was Hollywood scripted cliche' after cliche'. I seriously laughed when I needed to be more sympathetic. This isn't the only incident that has made me think this way. Time after time, I read about real life accounts of break ups, listen to friends and co-workers talk about relationships. I can't help but cramp up mentally when I'm trying to figure out in which movie I saw their specific scenarios. It's nauseating. Movies can help us gain insight about human nature, but we can't live it by the script.

Love is love. We can't explain it, but we make excuses for why we'll never fall in love again. I'll admit that I've declared myself a victim of love numerous times. Momentarily, I would blame love itself for my angst. It's so much easier to push the blame off on something we can't taste, smell or touch. Once the tears stopped flowing, I could see my way through the gamut of red flags that littered my sensibilities and realize that incompatibility, dishonesty, and/or timing would be the culprit.

Love is in the air. It's less than a week away from the big V-day. Nothin' 'bout love makes sense, but when you just let go you'll come to realize that all you need is love ... love IS a many splendoured thing.