Practical Love

When you fall in love, you have the ability to filter out all the bad traits and actions about the person and only see the good. Love paints its own picture. It is a combination of reality, attraction, and what you want to see. Oh, our friends and family see the whole reality, but we seldom do. But Love changes our eyes and we see things differently. Things may not be changed but they are to us. That is not reality, it is our reality. But there is no other kind of reality but our own, because that is how we record things in our own mind. When you are duped or dumped or cheated on by the person we love, that perspective changes in an instant. Over the next minutes, hours, days, weeks, months that person we saw through Love's eyes changes. It gets flipped. The mind only remembers all the bad things and probably as a defense mechanism, they turn ugly. You see, consciously or unconsciously, we choose to love. Falling in love is an expression that we use to describe it, because i...

There are no less than 32 reality TV shows about weddings. "Four Weddings" is the marriage competition where 4 couples compete for the best wedding on national TV. Then there is "Bridezilla" where we get to make fun of the nightmare bride. But lets not forget about "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" where we get to watch as people compete to win a bride or a husband. It makes the fight to save marriage from the Gays seem a little ridiculous. It also makes you wonder what they are fighting for. Does marriage equality mean they are getting an opportunity to be exploited on TV or to be divorced? The conventional wisdom and research seems to point to 40-50% of first marriages and 60% of second marriages end in divorce. Although I am skeptical of the research and statistics on that one, I certainly know a lot of people who have divorced. In my immediate family, the statistic is 30%. I don't exactly want to get into the reasons for divorce,...

Why do we get married? Lord knows that marriage in this country has become a temporary transition to the next person. We live in a disposable society with water in plastic bottles and everything has packaging to discard. Our electronics are even disposable as we are encouraged to throw out our computers, iPods and cellphones after a year or two. But marriages were meant to last. ...'Til death do us part. But society has taught us that when something seems old and/or broken, you ditch it for a new model. Even if it's not, there is something better that just came out that you HAVE to have.   So WHY marriage? The wedding is expensive. Takes nearly a year to plan. You invariably piss someone off. And then there is the gifts, and should she change her last name? Ahh, there it is, change the name. The woman gets married to the man to become his property and to produce heirs. Right? That is where marriage originated, but it has transformed over the years and recently love even en...

I think it is hard to understand the concept of Love. We are told that God is Love and to love and that we are loved, but what is it? What does Love mean? I have been pondering this question, because it is so hard to fathom the depth of the meaning. And, of course, there are many contexts and meanings. It is a noun and a verb too. In the Christian Bible, in 1 Corinthians 13:4–8a , we read that "Love is patient, love is kind..." While this is beautiful and often said at weddings, it is less than tangible for us. I thought about this and how Jesus of Nazareth might have answered this question. He would have used analogy or parable to do it. "The kingdom of heaven is like..." So what is Love like? I like "water" to answer that question. So what if God was water? Love was water. I am not suggesting that he/she/it is water. This is analogy.  About water Every day we wake up and take a shower or go to the river to clean ourselves with water. This is comf...

Life is a matter of perspective. This is illustrated so beautifully in the TV show Downton Abbey, on PBS. For the two of you that have not seen this program (Mitt Romney, because it is on PBS and another guy), it is about aristocrats and their servants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downton_Abbey and you get to see both sides with their struggles and triumphs. Of course, they are very different. Another great cliché is that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Which simply means that we all have our own perspective and what it means to us is quite different. Most of what we hate about others comes from two places: 1) They are too different from us and 2) They are too similar to us. Think of the last time someone "wronged" you. It is either that they acted in a way that was different than you or what you would want from them. Or, they acted exactly like you and you hate that about yourself. My favorite act to talk about, because it is so universal...