Be Love or Leave
A friend invited me to dinner this week and we went with another couple. The couple have just met – each about a year after a divorce with grown children (read: in their 20s). My friend and I marveled at their joy on finding each other at this time.
A friend of mine’s daughter who is 14 went to a dance last night for the first time and was nervous and giddy on departing and vague upon return. The boy she is interested in went with another girl from another school – his attraction to either remains ambiguous.
A friend of mine was over for dinner and we were speaking about another friend who has hooked up with a guy who she was lukewarm about at first, but now into it a few weeks, is trying to decode his text messages and obsessing about what he is thinking. My friend wants her to stop and to just try and let it all be sexy and nothing more. [read: lots of luck]
A friend of mine has a few dates, another friend is breaking up with her boyfriend, another friend proposed, and yet another went out on about six dates in seven days – like that.
A friend today told me she is having a hard time in her relationship – that it might be ending – that it is incredibly sad and she is not quite sure what to do.
As winter turns its corner, and holidays gather steam here, my friends are falling in and out of love, I say to everyone who passes through my door, “Be Love or Leave.”
We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
~ John Updike, Brazil