Love, sometimes, is an uphill battle

Commentary

I have noticed a fundamental error in the imagination of one or both parties that have sought me to consult their love problems and heartache. Nowadays, we are led to believe that love works when it flows quickly and smoothly. But ease is not a symptom of authentic love, for the simple reason that real life, which is where love is realized, has nothing easy about it. As anyone can experience, life brings difficulties, unforeseen unwanted problems, trials, and failures.

Moreover, if we honestly look at ourselves as lovers, we suffer from limitations, defects, inexperience, and mistakes that we transfer into our relationships without malice or carelessness. Love is all the more real when we can understand that it is a joint construction. And building love is like an ascent, not a slide—a climb, not a fall.

To put together efforts, consensus, concord, patience, and reciprocal mercy is an asset. While having your complaints and reproaches ready to be fired is a liability. Difficulties and obstacles are typical because they are “real”: the “reality” of loving each other is a conquest, not vagrancy. It is facing them and solving them – together and in agreement – what allows the preservation, growth, and authentic restoration of our love. Realism, humbleness regarding our self-esteem, and shared courage to persist with loyal fidelity allow those who want to love each other to see in every daily circumstance – the easy and the difficult ones – the concrete opportunities, here and now, to unite more profoundly and substantially. Then, thanks to the gaze of love, problems shall be seen as opportunities. We will care primarily about finding the solution to our problems.

The light that shines through this type of gaze is also a test. Examine yourself. Be careful if you consistently experience difficulties as failures instead of opportunities; if problems become reproaches and occasions, blame is shifted onto the other person. If this is how you live, you are the main problem, for you never recognize opportunities! Fortunately, you are on time. Change the way you see and approach things. Put fresh air, renewed atmosphere, hope in your relationships. Accept the challenge. If you manage to do so in harmony with your husband or wife, you have already turned the problem into a bigger and stronger union. Even before you have solved it, you came closer together. It was “worth it” to you.