What I Know About Love

I was in Washington DC with my best friend Quinn, and she gave me an analogy. She made a paper heart for me.

"This is your heart before you started giving it to boys who don't know how to handle it."

And then she proceeded to rip up the heart.

"This is your heart now, and it will only get worse if you keep doing what you're doing. So stop it."

She said it with a lot more grace than the words described, but with the same Quinn logic that cannot be argued with.

On the Megabus, I watched An Education (Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard are amazing), and I couldn't help crying my little eyes out as I identified with the heart break and loss of innocence. We never learn anything if we don't take any risks, but too often we break our own hearts with our inability to heed the warning signs. When I first began venturing to find love, I wasn't really considering the hurt I would go through. What I like most about the movie is that there is redemption. She isn't powerless; she doesn't go back into the same cycle of being seduced by worldliness. She throws herself into her hopes and dreams of Oxford. And she makes it, and she is wiser when it comes to love.

Unlike me. I throw myself in front of one toxic love to the next. I don't want to be Lady GaGa. I don't want bad romances. I don't want one night stands. I want extraordinary. I want true love. I am like that Natasha Bedingfield song called I Wanna Have Your Babies. "Trust me, it would scare you" she sings. And it would, because this is what I want: I want a MAN OF GOD (Chris Rice, Don Miller, or Nick Vujicic will do), I want a ring, a wedding, and a lifetime of love that even death can't stop.

I want a man to sing to me:

"A kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder

All my riches for her smiles when I sleep so soft against her

All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter

She is the tear that hangs inside my soul forever."

I want a man to pursue me in spite of my insanity. I want a man to love me, soul and body. I want a man who will speak the heart of God to me.

Maybe I am too much and not enough. Maybe he isn't out there.

Maybe there is only one man for me, and maybe his name is Jesus.

This is the only man who has ever truly loved me, and all I know about love is what I've learned from him.