Pretty Little Love Song...

You know how you can hear something for years and think it says one thing and then one day you find out you have been saying it, or in this case, singing it, all wrong?  Well this happened to me the other day.  I tend to go between the 70s and 80s station on satellite radio.  I listen to other stuff also, but these two channels are my favorites.  Both channels take me back to a time where life was simpler and is replete with fond memories.

The other day on the 70s channel a song came on that I have always thought was titled “Pretty Little Love Song.”  Well, that is not the name of the song at all and if I would have listened more carefully to the words of the song, I might have known that...The correct title of the song is “Heard it in a Love Song.”  And for whatever reason, my brain heard Pretty Little Love Song.

And listening to the lyrics would have cleared up my confusion immediately.  Pretty Little Love Song would not have been the title, clearly.  Just another song about someone who wants to love and commit, seems to have found someone worthy of committing to, but, for whatever reasons, just can’t seem to do it.  And this always makes me wonder, are they just broken beyond repair, or have they just made a commitment to themselves that supersedes any further commitment to anyone else?

I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships and love and commitment.  And I have spent a very long time helping people get out of unhappy unions.  I would never say I have seen it all, but I have seen a lot.  And I have absolutely been one of those people who would really like to commit but always seems to find a reason, real or imagined, to break away.  And I have forever been asking myself the question: “is this because I am just that broken, or did I make a commitment to myself that will forever shadow and supersede all commitments to anyone and everyone else?”

When I was younger, I thought that being the “Desperado” was a goal.  I mean, love them and leave them, again and again. Always wanting to find that person I couldn't live without, but then finding, actually, I lived just fine without them.  Forever, heading down the trail, a string of broken hearts in my wake, sometimes the heart I broke, was my own.  Then I grew up and saw that living a life of isolation and heartbreak was no real way to live.  But I would be lying if I didn’t say that the die was cast and it has taken me a very long time to make any real progress in the direction of commitment and relationshiping.

I no longer want to be the love them and leave them woman.  I think instead I have rounded into the “I just do better on my own..” kind of person.  Freedom is something that I value more than any one person I have ever met.  I don’t really want to be this way, but at 56, this may just be the way I am...I mean how long can one person keep up the delusion that there is the right person out there, I just haven't met them yet?

There are a lot of pretty little love songs...but honestly, I have heard it in a love song way more often than I have experienced it myself.  My need for autonomy and freedom always ending up being greater than any one person I have met or dated.  Again, I don’t love this about me, but I think I am coming to the place in my life where I just am willing to accept it.  I like my life.  I don’t mind dating, but I am beginning to ask myself towards what end?  If I do not want a commitment, why am I dating?  Seems kinda pointless...and yet again, so does just quitting altogether. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take...

I guess the bottom line is that we hear a lot of things in pretty little love songs, all loosely based on reality.  And most of them, really, are about heartbreak and loss because that is the more common experience for all of us.  Talk about having a life long satisfying, committed, loving relationship, and you will get a lot of blank stares.  But talk about getting your heart obliterated, everyone just nods and thinks, “fuck, man, I have been there!”

There are lots of pretty little love songs and we have heard a lot in those love songs.  Some of them life affirming, some of them our salvation as we drift on the perilous seas of dating and loving.  I guess what I think about today is that heartbreak is a universal language we all share.  And so is love.  And I guess, all of us, regardless of the inevitable outcome, have found salvation in the things we heard in all those pretty little love songs that got us through the hard times that must come with loving, dating and relating.

Again, still...