For Those Who've Loved

For those who've loved, you understand the sheer intoxication of it; how nothing else seems to matter, and that whatever the outcome, the risk is always worth it in the end. Due to the nature of love it is inherently abstract. For those who haven't experienced the feeling it can be difficult to comprehend, let alone to justify making a leap of faith and opening up to someone. Sadly, most of the time love is not forever, and the most difficult part of falling out of love is getting to the realization that love will come once again; probably never in the same way as it once did, but what makes love exciting is that it is always different.

One of the most important things about life is to mourn the losses because they are many, but celebrate the victories because they are few. Love is always a victory. No matter the outcome and no matter context, to love is to have lived.

Often times the thought of being so close to someone is scary. Many people even go to extremes avoiding it, and the most common way is putting up road blocks that inhibit the possibility of ever letting someone get that close to you. For most this is a subconscious act. Constantly making excuses or finding reasons to avoid getting close. From not wanting to get close to someone because you plan to move away soon, for fear of getting hurt, or because it's just not as perfect as it was the first time these reasons and many more hold you back from living. Inside everyone yearns to discover what love is and to experience it, but what they don't realize is that by making these excuses you're missing out on life.

Interestingly all these excuses seem to be similar in that they have more to do with the losing love, and less about actually being in love. The good news though is that all of these reasons and excuses are in our ability to remediate. For the most part the only person putting up these road blocks is you and luckily you have the ability to pull them down; save for one. For those who happen to find love with persons of the same sex there is one road block being put up that is making life difficult for all of us. This particular road block is difficult to pull down because on the surface it doesn't seem to affect our ability to love, but what it does instead is affect our right to do so. Although the ability to marry the person you love does not keep you from loving, but for many of us knowing that the summit is legally unattainable is enough to leave us hesitant to start the climb.

Banning same-sex marriage is essentially someone else putting an obstacle in the way of living your life, but not only that, it's someone else telling us that what we experience is not love, and is somehow less significant than love between a man and woman.

For those who've loved this should be an outrage, and for those who haven't it is so important that you realize how devastating this is for the rest of us. To have someone tell you that the most immense joys, excruciating pains, intense vulnerabilities, and highest accomplishments you have felt were not only fake and unnatural, but also less significant than theirs is debilitating. The most difficult part of this to understand is that by trivializing what gays experience as love to be something less than that inherently threatens the significance of what everyone experiences as love. Part of what makes love so special is the fact that everyone can have it.

To give love boundaries is to destroy what makes it great, and for this reason all of us, gay and straight, should be fighting against them. It's time to stand up and demand equal recognition for love in all of its forms. Allowing love to be devalued is the same as allowing our lives to be devalued. This isn't about your physical person being sub-class; creed, race, and religion have no bearing here. This is about your life. Fight for your right to live because the true meaning of life is love, and without it life is empty and pointless.