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Modern Love

I’ve recently gone through my 3rd or perhaps 4th trip through the show Modern Love on Amazon Prime. And let me tell you it has me thinking a lot about the topic. The show has a bunch of stories with each episode inspired by a real-life personal essay from the New York Times column, “Modern Love.”

For a fair few years I was an unabashed hopeless romantic. I still may be but certainly feeling more on the recovery side of my true love addiction these days.

For a while, I took my musings on life and love and put them out on the internet for all to bare. Some we’re positive, some were negative, some went viral, and some were barely read at all. More or less I spent that time period of my life being unabashed about putting my feelings on the subject for the internet. However, the real problem with about being a hopeless romantic in your 20’s is that you haven’t the foggiest fucking clue what love is and a lot of my writings show that.

Sure had I fallen for people before? Absolutely.

Had I had my heart broken? Couple of times yea.

But it takes time, and for sure more of life to get a clear picture of what love is. And at that point I just wasn’t sure. As I’ve gone through my most recent trip through Modern Love it has me feeling some type of way.

When you hit your mid 30’s and may or may not have had the luck to end up with the person you’re meant to spend your life with, I think rom-com’s and shows like this can have different effects on a person. For me, it’s been a blessing and has some how managed to reignite my love for writing.

Writing was the thing I did when I felt things 10 years ago. It was the place I went to when I was feeling happy and it was the place I went to when I was feeling sad. The page became a place where I could pour out all the words and feelings I had bottled up inside of me without anyone else’s input or noise to drown out the things I wanted to say. Unfortunately, as life went on, it also became a place that made me feel increasingly lonely. It was a sad realization when the page betrayed me because I no longer felt I had a place to go to with what was happening in my life. The proverbial ink had dried.

For a long time I was never the person to lay my feelings out on the table. It was always a day late or a dollar short when I inherited the courage to inevitably speak to what I was feeling and by that point it was too late. I don’t have many regrets in my life but to say I have zero would be a lie. There are the people who meant things to me that never fully formed or materialized into what the hopeless romantic in me would have wanted and for that I’ll always feel like I have something unfinished. It’s funny how looking back now it has sparked in me an ability to put pen to paper what it felt like then.

When I look back now a lot of things stick out. I’ve been thinking about how the expression it’s better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In truth, at some point if you’ve reached my age and are still single, the story always is about the ones that got away.

And maybe in hindsight, that’s ok.

Let me allow my glass half full mantra to shine through for a moment.

While this story would be seemingly sad (but is actually not) the one benefit to having not ended up with the one yet is that life has still given me a tremendous amount to be thankful for. Love aside, I’ve been given more gifts these last years than I could possibly ever deserve. While I’ve not necessarily put the last chapter in my book on love, it’s ok for the story to go unfinished on a shelf for now, it’s a story for another day. The good news is, while I may currently be without love, I do have plenty to say about these things again and for that I’m grateful.

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