For as long as I can remember I’ve been in love with the idea of loving someone and being loved. I would sit and observe as my gran and grandad held hands walking around the garden after fifty years of marriage, I watched Notting Hill till my eyes stung from crying, I am always willing to give up my time for a good ‘how we first met’ story. I’m just a sucker for love.
The issue with being so in love with the idea of love is that it’s exactly that, an idea. Love has become so marketed and commodified that it can be so easy to forget all the work that actually goes into loving someone and being loved. It’s true my gran and grandad have the loveliest relationship and purest love that I know, and I can only hope that one day I’ll be lucky enough to have something that even comes close to that, but I’m sure there has been a lot of work put into making that love, and it’s not always been holding hands in the rosy garden, and god knows Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts had their fair share of issues to work through in Notting Hill.
When the focus is being in love with love and not the actual person, it’s easy to look past things that may mean you’re not compatible with each other
Although it’s definitely not a bad thing to appreciate love in all of its forms, it can hinder relationships. When the focus is being in love with love and not the actual person, it’s easy to look past things that may mean you’re not compatible with each other and in doing so create a relationship based on the idea of being in a relationship rather than actually knowing each other for all your strengths and flaws. This can mean that when the 'honeymoon period' ends, it can be a real shock when you realise that disagreements have to be worked through, they're going to do things that will really annoy you and hugs have to be given when they’re ill – like an extended cut of Notting Hill where Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant are five years into their relationship and have to work through an argument about who didn’t put the bins out last night.
Real love is when you forget that you're even in love at all, it's not like the movies or the songs, it's just having a real, natural admiration for someone
My point is, that real love is when you forget that you're even in love at all, it's not like the movies or the songs, it's just having a real, natural admiration for someone for all their flaws.