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.