Laws of Attraction week continues at the NDD

Have you ever tried to fall in love?  It’s sort of like trying to enjoy the taste of food you don’t like.  It’s possible you could end up liking it, that is true. Obviously from childhood to adulthood we like things that at first we really hated. Just watch a kid take a taste of wine or beer or eat a bite of brussel sprouts. It’s not very likely they will have a happy face.  But given enough time they might come to enjoy it.  Will they come to love the taste? Perhaps.  Will the come to be IN LOVE with that substance? Probably not.  Probably the substance they are going to have the deepest affection for is the stuff they loved as a small child, from the beginning. That is why comfort food is called comfort food, because we are so in love with that great feeling of security and comfort we find in that food from our childhood.

Love can be the same way.  I once saw a report on arranged marriages and how statistically they have an equal or better chance of lasting than a typical western ‘fall in love, romantic’ marriage.  Why is that?  A lot of reasons beyond being in love, obviously. But the report did interview a number of long term married couples who started in arranged marriages.  Their comments could be reduced to this; ‘marriage first, love later’.   Western inclinations lean towards the opposite; ‘love first, marriage later’.   But how many of our western marriage actually keep that ‘in love’ feeling alive after so many years?  Doesn’t the marriage have to rely on something more than that feeling, which may or may not always be there?

So, in my head while you can’t, and shouldn’t, force love, you can build love.  You can, over time, find things about the other person that cause you to fall ‘in love’ with them again and again, but in new ways you could not have anticipated because life and what happens to us is unexpected.  The key is to always be open and available for that to happen at any moment now or into the future. It might be an event, it might be a change in your heart, who knows.  But it can happen, and if you are paying attention, it might happen sooner than you think.

Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman, a lover not a fighter.

Quote by anonymous