Love that silences your imagination

Hello. I really would like to talk to you about love tonight.

I shouldn’t really know what love is. I’ve never had a proper relationship and my parents were very poor examples. (They are bitterly divorced.)

And yet I know what love is. I know what it looks like, I can sense when it is present. I can even imagine what it feels like. And best of all I feel confident that I will recognise it when it comes into my life. And guess how I know …

My friends showed me.

I have had four good friends get married, and another to come in January. And when I attended their weddings - which were celebrations of their love - I was given the opportunity to really look and think about their relationships. And it was only then I began to get a sense of what love is.

Truman Capote once said this about short story writing:

The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

It is a gorgeous piece of imagery that I would also like to apply to love. That is not to say that each of the afore mentioned relationships were all smooth sailing - in fact there were significant challenges in almost all of them. They were not “destined to be”. And yet they came to be, and now as they are, it cannot be imagined any other way. There is something about these relationships that wholly and wonderfully makes sense.

That is how to recognise love. When, on reflection, no other alternative can even be imagined.

A girl in Sydney, a boy in Melbourne

A friend of mine - one of my best friends, in fact - recently asked me to do a reading at her wedding. She flattered me by saying how much she liked my writing so could I read something I’d written or write something for the ceremony? Of course I agreed, but did so without any awareness of how difficult I would find the task.

My previous pieces of writing more frequently featured titles like, “A manifesto for single people”, hardly appropriate at a wedding, so there was nothing for it but to write something from scratch. I wrote, butchered, trashed, re-wrote, in my head and on the paper, over and over again. There were two unique obstacles:

1. This wasn’t a speech, it was a reading, so I couldn’t joke my way through with a few funny and sentimental stories.

2. I’m a perpetual bachelorette of two (very much) divorced parents. What do I know about love and marriage, other than the kind that is either unrequited or utterly traumatizing?

Everything I had on paper looked desperately cynical, self-conscious, too earnest, too egotistical, too nervous. It was all so wrong.

In the end, it was a conversation I had with her, a mere half day before the actual ceremony, that inspired the bulk of my reading. Which just goes to show that one really must draw from life to write something authentic.

—

In Sydney, there is a girl. She is equal parts nerd, equal parts fabulous. The girl love words. She uses it to not only describe the world she lives in, but also all the aching, sweet and soaring feelings that come pouring out of her. She uses them to ascribe things meaning, and to give things a relationship to one another, in the hope that perhaps she can make sense of a world that is too often senseless.

In Melbourne, there is a boy. His mind is filled with big ideas, his heart full of feeling. Girl and boy, they are in love.

At first this love inspires the girl to do what she always has. She writes. Allow me to correct myself, she doesn’t write - she blogs. The perfect medium for the self-reflective type. She writes furiously and without abandon about her new love. The words are natural and free, tumbling and fumbling thoughts that veer wildly between ecstasy and angst.

Allow me to read you an excerpt. [Read a hilarious and sweet excerpt from her blog describing the first time she told her then-crush-now-husband she liked him.]

Alas, like any good love story, it was not all smooth sailing. But any time spent apart was to be but a pit stop, and in the second time around, something had changed. The girl no longer wrote cascading sentences of adoration for her love. And yet she still adored her love. Her blogs no longer danced between false bravado and nervous second-guessing. And yet she still had a piercing sense of analysis, still had moments of doubt. Her blog - though now excellent in a different way - was no longer her best friend to which she would confess all. Because this time, she had found that best friend. And his name is [my friend’s husband].

The girl loves words, but in love, words fail. They don’t deserve to capture love, because words are bodies, and love rises above the weakness of mere mortals. Love is an energy, a movement. Each of us can sense it when we’re standing in this room. When we’re with this boy and girl.