Unmended hearts

Today is Valentine Day - a date set aside to celebrate the unique role of the heart in making one's body and soul in a perfect state of reciprocity. Hopefully , there are many whose hearts feel happy and content because of the feeling of being in love and loved, as well. It is also possible that there are many lonely hearts who just lost the object of affection and who are hurting deeply.

If we speak emotionally, how do we really secure the well-being of the heart. Two people can be in love today and become bitter enemies the next day. How fickle can the heart be? How strong can promises of timeless love become in the face of differences that seem to get deeper with every argument? I have learned through the years that love is its own enemy, that the more one loves the more claustrophobic the relationship gets. It feels that love becomes a vine and simply strangles the life out of the other. One suffers from a relationship that lacks trust and respect.

I have women friends with unmended hearts and their stories have great variations. One is a love story that goes back to her university days where the heart never recovered from the hurt of loss. Without a closure in her love affair, her succeeding relationships were always faulty and imperfect. Another friend who is an accomplished lawyer woke up one morning to learn that her husband of many Valentine celebrations just took up a relationship with a younger woman from Africa. Despite many opportunities for meeting worthy men, the heart is taking a longer time to heal and does not respond to love eagerly.

The sadder story that I hear from another friend is her perpetual search for the right man - a man who can share her quest for security and even more, her emotional passion for love in all its manifestations. So she goes on with the hunting - from one matchmaking website to another and from one singel bar to the next. The sex partners are not that hard to find it would seem, but how does one build a relationship based on a few nights of passionate sex? She runs into variations of male imperfections from false marital status to sexual inadequacy.

I suppose that today would be a good time to re-examine that state of health of our hearts. Unmended hearts can eventually lead to one's death as in cardiac arrest. There is only so much anguish and punishment the heart can take and when it is in trouble, the rest of the body suffers. What I am trying to say is that, it is not worth it to over-indulge in self-flagellation in the name of love. Love is not a state of perfection where it is spring forever. Love must be able to survive the worst there is in one's person as much as we try to endure a truly hard winter as we have now. As the cliche goes, fight for your love but don't kill yourself over love.#