I read an article over the weekend - a transcript of a podcast, to be specific - and it didn't just "blow my mind"...it might have actually changed my life.
In this episode, titled The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships, the philosopher Alain de Botton (who, you might recall, wrote that NY Times article 'Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person' that everyone and their mother emailed you back in 2016), presents the argument that we, as human beings, would be much saner and happier if we altered our view of love away from the dizzying, romantic whirlwind that ends (miraculously!) with marriage, and rather recognized that the real work of love "is not in the falling, but in what comes after."
Here's why I think this podcast floored me to the extent that it did: I've been thinking a lot, these past many months, about love, and how one goes about doing it again after a major trauma (like, say, a divorce). The last time I was in this place - by which I mean a place of being open to new love coming into my life - I was, in so many ways (most ways?), a child. I had next-to-no responsibilities to anyone but myself, which meant that I could approach a new relationship with an abandon that, to me, feels both recklessly naive...and also completely impossible to avoid, if what we're talking about is on the "true love" end of the spectrum.