“Love love love, you can’t imagine what you do to me…”
This is one of those songs that gets me smiling every time it plays, and swinging my non-existent hips, stepping, doing the shuffle, generally making a fool of myself. I’m assuming you know the drill by now, but if not, press play on the Donny Hathaway Hathaway
It occurs to me that there are defining relationships in our lives that seem to determine the path we take. That teacher you had in standard four who convinced you can sing, and you’ve spent the rest of your life trying to make it onto some reality show like Project Fame and such like. Or the college lecturer who told you, in that deprecating tone only a lecturer can pull off, that you could never become a surgeon, and now you’re pushing papers as a CPA. Or the best friend you had who convinced you that you had the ball handling skills of Ronaldo (Brazilian original not the pretty boy wanna-be), and now you’re an almost star playing for Sher Karuturi. Or the ex boyfriend who told you have the sexiest legs ever, and now you’re still wearing mini skirts, long past your expiry date. We all have them, ghosts of a past encounter that continue to define our lives to this day. And nowhere is this more evident than in our love lives.
Ah yes, love, love, love…
When it’s good, its really good isn’t it? But what about when it’s bad? Well, it’s even better. I can see you frowning, but please bear with me as I make a flimsy argument. The way I figure, nothing changes your life more dramatically than bad love. Why? Well, because we’re foolish, aren’t we? The only way we ever learn anything is by failing miserably at it first no? And oh how miserably we fail when it comes to love. Don’t worry I’m not going to start getting philosophical on the power of love and other such like nonsense, there’s more than enough idiots online tackling that rubbish every day, I can send you the links. Instead, I’d like to talk about bad love and how good it’s been for me, and all the rest of us defective bastards who can never seem to get it right.
Most of us have a serious relationship in our past that didn’t work out, for whatever reason. He left you for your best friend, you left him for his richer boss, he had a baby with another woman, she was shagging the watchman, you drifted apart after college, he moved to the Cayman Islands for work and never came back, she realised she preferred girls, he realised he preferred girls… the reasons for failed relationships is as varied as the relationships themselves. Irrespective of why it ended, the fact is we hold on the grief and/or anger much longer than we should, often dragging the baggage from that relationship into the next one, and then the next, and on and on. Now conventional wisdom has it that this is a bad thing, all this regurgitation. I don’t agree. I think it’s a good thing. Hell, I think it’s bloody brilliant. How else are we expected to learn from our mistakes if we don’t keep rehashing them, over and over again?
You’re not buying this are you? Then let me tell you my story.
I loved a man once, truly madly deeply, he captivated me like no man had before. And then he left. And I have spent the last four years trying desperately to let go, and trying desperately to hang on. Twisted I know, but I’ve never claimed to be normal, brilliant yes, but definitely not normal, but I digress. Thing is, since Mr ‘the-feelings-are-gone’ all the men I’ve dated, or wanted to date, or simply wanted, have been in one way or another strange versions of this man. There was a guy that talked like him, one who drank like him, one who even looked like him (that was truly creepy, but that’s a story for another day). Turns out, I’ve been trying to recreate what I had with ex and neither I nor the poor bastards who’ve been my unsuspecting lab rats had any idea, all we knew was that for whatever reason it didn’t work out.
I know what you’re thinking, ‘its because of the baggage, you twit!’ and you’re probably right. For as long as I was sub-consciously (or maybe consciously) looking to replicate the past, I was never going to get over it, right? Wrong. Looking for a do-over helped, no, forced me to take a good long hard look at that relationship and see it for what it really was. I told you he left me, what I didn’t tell you was that my constant bitching made it impossible for him to stay. He said the feelings were gone, I suspect the feelings were never really there, at least not those feelings. And there are more examples of what it seemed versus what it really was, some good, some bad, some not entirely useful. The point is, the only reason I can sit here calmly dissecting this failed relationship, and all others since, is because of my not so peculiar attempts at recreating it no?
When that relationship ended, I couldn’t see past my grief, all I wanted was to fill the hole he’d left behind. Or not, it depended on the mood I was in, amount of wine in my system, blah blah blah… I never learnt the lessons I should have from whatever mistakes I made with him, it’s only by repeating the same mistakes that it finally sank in, the pattern emerged so to speak. Now, I suspect there are better ways of learning life’s lessons, but I haven’t figured them out yet ,so I’m stuck working through this shit the best way I know how. It’s not perfect, but nothing ever is. But if there’s one thing the last couple of years have taught me, its this: not only is it okay to fuck up, its important to fuck up every so often, otherwise how will you know when you’ve got it right?
The song should have ended by now, play it one more time but this time just sit back and listen to Mr Hathaway sing.
“Love, love, love…”
