Something I read on the forum I belong to which is incredibly relevant to me and my life that I’d like to share and explore here in geishaland;

It’s easy to love someone in the beginning. Everything seems great. But real love comes when your partner starts learning your faults. How your partner reacts to your crap can teach you a lot about conditional or unconditional love.

Relationships are work – hard work.  It isn’t always easy for two people to get along with one another, especially as time goes by.  Of course in the beginning everything seems wonderful and perfect – where has this person been my whole life you think to yourself!  How did I ever get along in this world without them!

And then reality sets in…

You start learning that this perfect person you waited your whole life to find is a human being, with their own little quirks, faults and idiosyncrasies, some of which may even get on your nerves after a while!  Maybe you even start to reevaluate what you ever saw in them in the first place!

What was I thinking??

I claim a certain kind of endearing flakiness, but I also recognize that I can be an absolute nightmare to live and deal with.  I can be incessantly emotional and unpredictable, but I like to think I balance my faults with my better qualities – and I know how to show the people I love and care about that I do love and care about them.  Showing and telling the people in our lives that they are important and valued and loved and cherished is so important to any relationship.  People need to know where they stand and how they are seen and valued to us, because if they don’t know those things…  it can lead to people making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, and could potentially destroy whatever relationship you have.

Unconditional love is a sacred thing, and if you’re lucky enough to find someone who loves you unconditionally, meaning that they get you and they understand you and they know what your faults are but they still love you anyway, you should hold onto that person, because it’s very rare.

You almost have to have a sense of humor about what happens to people when they break up – turning completely against the person who was once the center of their universe and unleashing a torrent of ugly human cruelty – seemingly able to erase the memory of everything special you once shared with that person and rewriting your own history to remove every possible trace of that person from your life.  We all do that to a degree… but it doesn’t change the fact that it still hurts.  We get hurt and we want to hurt back.  And unfortunately… it’s all too common; and if we could separate ourselves from the hurt we feel, the behavior would almost be comical if it didn’t involve real people with real feelings.

But back to unconditional love – I like to think that I show everyone in my life some form of unconditional love; certainly Jeff and Lisa.  I don’t know that there’s anything that they could do which would make me ever stop loving them.  That’s not to suggest that we don’t fight or get angry with one another, sometimes amazingly so, but to stop loving them?  That is an anathema to who - I - am.  I don’t throw away love or the people I love.

Even my friends have a sort of unconditional love from me; I value their friendship and what we share together, even when we don’t always agree on things or have different opinions about the world we share.  How lonely a life I would lead if I only surrounded myself with those who thought exactly as I did about every conceivable topic.  How would I ever grow as a human being if I just decided one day that I, and I alone, had unilaterally cornered the market on all human knowledge about everything and anything and fuck everyone else and what they think?  Aside from the fact that I would be an arrogant bitch for believing something as utterly ridiculous as that – I think I’d soon find myself without any friends at all.

It’s kind of hard to find perfect people, kwim? 

No, the world is not black and white – it’s filled with millions of shades of gray, and everyone has something worthwhile to offer us, no matter who they are, or what they may think.

And that viewpoint… is unconditional.