love and marria...no, just love.

I'm tackling love tonight.

I came into the dating world with an eager heart and a head full of misconceptions. I had seen a shade too many romantic movies and even though I realistically knew it would never happen like it happened for Meg Ryan, I still had hope.

I lost the misconceptions the hard way, basically by acting on an idea I had and having it all blow up in my face. Having never been in a relationship before, it came as a real shock to me that I had no clue how to handle one. Luckily, Casey apparently had expectations as low as mine were high, so he stuck with me.

I believed in soul mates and love at first sight until I fell in love. At some point I said, "No, this is not what it's about. There's no symphonic swelling music, and there is never going to be." And so I stopped looking for those things and began enjoying the things that had been there all along.

I asked Mama once how she felt about all that mushy stuff and this is basically what she told me. Mama believes that there are many many people any given person could fall in love with and share a lifetime of happiness. Naturally, you're going to be happier with some than others, but you'll never have any way of knowing that. It just boils down to whoever you meet at the right time and place in your life.

It's unromantic, but it rang true from the beginning, so I stole it. I've since decided that sometimes love is just finding someone whose faults don't irritate you too much and whose qualities make you happy.

This is not to say that I know everything or even anything at all about love. I've noticed a disturbing pattern in my life: whenever I begin to think I do know everything about relationships, some greater force throws a whopper of a curveball that leaves me stranded and wondering how anyone ever got through a relationship alive. The last time? Casey was diagnosed with diabetes.

If I were more ambitious, I would come up with a point here, a nice closing paragraph that wrapped things up. But the nice thing about this journal is that I don't have to be great, just good enough for you to come back tomorrow. Actually, some of you have familial obligations to come back anyway, so I don't have to even break mediocre.

So those are my thoughts on love and relationships this evening.