True Love isn’t Found, It’s Built

Every time I watch a romance film with my cousins, I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes to the back of my head.

What do you mean you’re getting married to a man you met 2 weeks ago? What happened to getting to know each other? Granted, people used to get married a bit too quickly in the past.

But unlike in movies, relationships that move too quickly aren’t something you should look up to at all.

These characters claim that they’ve found “True Love” when they barely know what this person’s life was like before they met them.

Now I know it’s a movie and that it’s heavily romanticized to suit the audience. However, you should never underestimate how powerful a film is, no matter how bad or good.

I can say this for myself because I too have been heavily influenced by a film. To be precise, the opening sequence of a film.

Have you ever seen the Pixar movie Up?

If you haven’t, I suggest you watch it now. The first 10 minutes will have you bawling, I tell you. Even the most stoic of men had their hearts broken over this.

In less than five minutes, this movie managed to encapsulate what it is like to wholly love someone with your entire being. As short as this sequence was, it managed to give us a clear narrative of the milestones they’ve achieved in their relationship.

Believe it or not, this opening scene changed my perception of relationships.

Finding Love

I used to think that somewhere out there, there was a person destined for me. Someone who would love me regardless of who I was.

I’ve had a few failed relationships because of this skewed perception of mine. To prevent myself from feeling depressed, I had to convince myself that I was fated for someone else.

Thanks to Pixar, I realized that the world did not revolve around me.

There’s no one out there who was made perfectly for me. Scratch that, there’s no such thing as a perfect partner. There is always going to be a catch in the relationship whether we like it or not.

But that’s the beauty of it — you get to learn how to cope with each other’s shortcomings and help each other grow into better people. That’s how you build true love.

True love isn’t the lost treasure that you try to dig under a tree. It’s the tree that you looked after since it was a sapling.

True love is earned. It is made through years of nurture and compromise. It’s swallowing your pride and apologizing to your spouse when you know you were in the wrong.

In the words of Paul Hudson “True love is not a feeling, but a state of being.”

You don’t go in and out of love the same way feelings come and go. Love will always be there even when you’re upset with your partner.

Regardless of what you’re feeling, true love will always be there. It’s not going to disappear, not after you’ve taken great care of it for the past couple of years.

True love will always be with you wherever you go, even to death.