The Responsibility of Love

Many people seek love. We feel the gap of love in our society and try and find it in order to complete ourselves. When we can't find it in our own lives, we seek love in external source such as movies or novels. We need to know that two people can spend their lives together, happily. We want to see the ties of love that bind us to each other, for better or worse, through love.

When we consider how deeply our society is pervaded with the images and ideas of love, it's unsettling to realize how many of us avoid love. It's not that we don't want love, or we don't desire love. We like the idea of Hollywood love. The no-consequences, no-responsibility kind of love. The kind of love that's easy to find and just as easy to leave. That's the kind of love we want to find. Because that's the kind of love that's easy to leave.

The only problem with desiring this kind of love is that it will always be superficial. When it's only superficial, when it's easy to leave and comes without responsibility, then it's not love. Not real love.

Real love must be both offered and received with no conditions. There are no conditions, but love does come with responsibility. And that's what so many of us avoid. The bond love creates to another person and the responsibility that bond creates. It means we can no longer leave whenever the wind changes. It means we now have someone who cares and worries about us. And it means our actions have the power to hurt them, more than ever before.

Hollywood love is very nice and very pretty, but it lacks the power to change us. Real love gets under our skin and changes us in ways we never expected to be changed. And as frightening as it can be accepting the responsibility of love it is entirely worth it.