[Answer] What Should I Do If I Want a Sweet Romance?

[Answer] What Should I Do If I Want a Sweet Romance?

If all we ever did from birth was eat candy, we would probably never truly understand how sweet it is. But if, after a bowl of bitter herbal medicine, you were given a single piece of candy, it would likely taste like the best thing in the world. Love is much the same. Most love begins in sweetness; if it did not feel sweet and comforting, why would we choose to place ourselves in such a relationship at all?

That sweetness might be a smile cast over one’s shoulder in the afternoon sun. It might be a fleeting moment while walking hand in hand. It might be a sweet kiss on a date, or a warm embrace full of tenderness. Of course, sweetness can also be the bite mark left on your shoulder after passion has faded, or the angelic sleeping face of the person beside you when you wake. As the poem says, “If life were only like the first meeting, why should the autumn wind make a painted fan grow sorrowful?” At the beginning of love, every frown and every smile feels tender and sweet.

And yet, in love, most people “die of heartbreak.” Happy endings are not especially common. In most relationships, most people suffer, at least to some degree. The anxiety of gaining and losing, the torment of waiting that follows sweetness, the similar ache of longing, the despair of jealousy—every feeling can break the heart. It is like waiting in endless darkness for a fleeting ray of light, and it is precisely that ray of light that makes all the waiting and suffering feel worthwhile.

In The Little Prince, love may be the sensitive, thorn-covered rose: because of youth, both sides wound each other. Or it may be the fox, tamed by one another, only to face parting in the end. Yet being in love does not disappear simply because the beloved disappears. Sometimes love is only a high fever, while longing is the cough that follows and never quite gets better. Sometimes the wear and tear that love leaves on the soul may not heal for ten or twenty years. Like rheumatism, it always returns on rainy nights, tying the heart in knots.

But if love carries so much pain, why do we still fall so deeply into it? Instinctive attraction and impulse are certainly part of the reason, but perhaps Akana Rika in Tokyo Love Story explained it best: “Love is meaningful as long as you take part in it, even if it has no ending. The moment you fall for someone never disappears. It becomes the courage that helps you go on living, and it becomes a ray of light in your darkness.”

A good romance, even if it does not necessarily have a good ending, will still make your world a better place. So do not long merely for a sweet romance. Instead, gather your courage and have a romance that is truly worth it.