PROMPTuesday #48: L-O-V-E

San Diego Momma has another PROMPTuesday:

Please write a post about love: When you knew you were in love. How you stay in love. What those about to get married should know about love. What qualities you hope to find in someone when you fall in love, and/or so on. You can even go the route of “Best love/marriage advice you ever got or gave.” Or perhaps you want to write about your wedding day or engagement. If you’re not married or in a relationship, how will you know when you’ve found “the one?”

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We are born with an open heart, full of capacity to love and yet untrained. If we are blessed, our parents tend to our heart daily and provide support when we need it. Our heart is theirs and we share the pain and joy of life’s experiences. The parents realize a child’s heart must be unfettered if their child is to venture forth and share it with another. Parents try to teach a child how to care for themselves – to recognize threats and learn to safeguard their precious well-being. But children cannot remain as such forever and the very passage to adulthood is marked by the experiences that weather and condition the heart. The goal is not to pass through life unscathed, but to be better from each resolved struggle. The heart is sometimes damaged in these struggles, broken and scarred, and each time the child to teen to adult learns to protect their heart in a new way. And so, the adult is ready to take on the world with a shielded heart and guarded mind.

The world breeds skepticism and every day teaches us to steel ourselves lest we fall victim to our naivety. Thankfully, though, we do hold onto the contradictory belief that at some point, for some individual, we will need to cast off our armor. If we are to find purpose in our life’s endeavors then we know companionship is needed. The question is not to love or not, for we know that love given or withheld pulls upon a primal cord within us. No, the question is not an “if” but rather “who” we are to expose our inner selves to. Who do we let grasp hold of our unprotected heart?

There are many good, decent people in this world and we try to surround ourselves by those of shared values and morals. But there are few, if any, that we can completely trust to care for our spirit amid a world of self-interests. We are fortunate to have family, or find a friend, of such merit and even then our experiences with them are limited to fractions of ourselves. It is the life-companion that we are really seeking. We seek the one that can be trusted with all parts of ourselves, the only one that can truly see us.

Marriage is different than the loves we have earlier in life. Marriage is a promise between two people to care for one another more than they would for themselves. It is the final threshold of trust where you not only stop guarding your heart from them, you hand it over for their care as you promise to do the same with their heart. That promise is the birth of something new and lasting for the relationship. It is the first joining of the marriage, of the two lives, and the one that must be nurtured above all else. It must be tended to and supported together – each sharing the joy and pain and giving equally and unconditionally. It is the precious and pure thing that binds the two and from which a meaningful life of family, friends and fulfillment springs from. It is the promise that must not be broken. A heart held and hurt thus may bare a wound too deep to mend.