How to Have a Sweet Romance

How to Have a Sweet Romance

If all we did from the moment we were born was eat candy, we would probably never truly understand what sweetness tastes like. But if, after a bowl of bitter herbal medicine, we were given a piece of candy, it might taste like the best thing in the world. Love is much the same. Most love stories begin with sweetness; if a relationship did not bring us comfort and joy, why would we willingly place ourselves in it at all?

That sweetness might be a smile exchanged in the afternoon sunlight, a fleeting moment while walking hand in hand, a tender kiss on a date, or a warm embrace filled with affection. Of course, sweetness can also be the teeth marks left on a shoulder after passion has faded, or the angelic sleeping face of the person beside you when you wake. As written in a poem by Nalan Xingde: “If life were only like the first time we met, why should the autumn wind make the painted fan grieve?” At the beginning of love, every glance and every smile feels tender and warm.

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

In The Little Prince, love may be that sensitive rose with thorns, hurting each other out of youth and immaturity; or it may be the fox, tamed by one another, only to be forced in the end to face separation. Yet love itself does not disappear just because the beloved is gone. Sometimes love is only a high fever, while longing is the cough that follows and never quite heals, as Jonathan Lee once sang. Sometimes the wear and tear that love leaves on the soul may take ten or twenty years to recover from, if it ever does—like rheumatism, aching again on rainy nights and leaving the heart knotted with sorrow.

But if love brings so much pain, why do we still fall so deeply into it? Instinctive attraction and impulse certainly play a part, but perhaps Akana Rika from Tokyo Love Story explains it most clearly: “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 keep living, and a ray of light in your darkness.”

A good relationship, even if it does not necessarily end well, will still make your world more beautiful. So rather than longing for a perfectly sweet romance, gather your courage and have a love that is truly worth it.