I choose to believe the people there were just as ’80’s fab as they are depicted here.
(I didn’t mean to start writing again, but it’s just kind of happening and I’m going with it. I kind of reverse-psychologized (totally not a word…) myself by saying I wasn’t writing anymore this summer, but as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote himself (and yes, I’m being THAT person by quoting someone else): “You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.” And everyone kept telling me to write about this, so…)
Love is a lot like the Tower of Babel. Or at least, I think is probably is.
In the story of the Tower of Babel (a less colloquial version can be found in Genesis 11), everyone was chilling out, speaking the same language, & working on a big real estate project, when BAM. God was like “Nope.” He confused everyone’s language so that everyone was speaking different dialects and nobody could understand one another and then He scattered everyone across the world. That’s how we got the name “Babel,” which is similar to the Hebrew word “balel” (“to jumble.”)
Can you imagine how utterly confusing that would have been? One second, you’re hanging with your friends building a tower and then the next, you’re speaking English, someone else is speaking Cantonese, and yet another person is next to you speaking Arabic (or whatever…just go with the metaphor.) I cannot imagine the feeling of panic and isolation as you (and everyone else around you) cannot communicate with one another. Can you imagine the relief and security when you finally meet someone who understands what you’re saying?
I kind of think love is the same way.
Love is finding someone who speaks your language.
Everyone speaks a different dialect or language and we’re kind of scattered all across the world looking for others who understand us. And it’s not easy! For some, maybe there’s only a few people in the entire world who speak your same language. Maybe others have a more widely spoken dialect, so it’s easier to find someone who speaks the same language. I don’t believe in a soul mate, but I do think that for some people, there’s a smaller amount of possibilities than for others.
And maybe those are the types of people who settle. Maybe people get tired of wandering around, looking for someone to understand what they’re saying. Maybe they find someone who brokenly speaks a little bit of their language, like Spanglish, and decide that this is better than waiting more.
Love isn’t an accomplishment. It’s something that happens, in whatever length of time that it happens to take. Long or short, trust the process.
Or at least, that’s what I plan to do. And to quote yet another author, J.R.R. Tolkien, “Not all who wander are lost [or desperate.]”
