Battle-lines are never drawn straight.

The media provides a few iconic ways to view love and relationships:
1. True love, can conquer all.
2. True love, in it basics, is simple: Love is simple, life is difficult.
3. True love is worth fighting for; true love may involve a lot of fighting (The Notebook, comes to mind) but in the end, if you truly  love each other, you'll make it work.

Well...what is it? Is love in it's purest form supposed to be simple? Come easy? Is everything else just the struggles expected while trying to hold on to its purity?

OR.

Is love a battlefield? Constants of dueling power. Trying to control one another, trying to maintain or destabilize control, within the relationship.

OR.

Is it both/all of those things?

For as limitless and creative and free-spirited as I might be, there are moments when I wish these questions had a finite answer.

Relationships are HARD. Be it friendships or romantic.

Back to romantic relationships.

With this divorce rate, my own family experiences, and my OWN experiences, I often wonder what makes a good relationship.

CORRECTION.

What makes a relationship worth staying in?

What makes "The One"?

Is the one someone we WANT or NEED to be THAT one? Or is it something, comically decided upon, beyond our control...i.e. fate?

And SAY it is what WE WANT, who is to say any relationship is really real? It is only as real as we want it to be. RIGHT?

I feel like I'm talking in circles, but how do you know when to let go? When you ask the question? Or when you ask the question because you are scared that the answer might have already come to you? When you are just too tired...or too lazy?

OR.

When you are fighting against everything that other tell you to do; when society says that when the going gets tough in relationships (but not friendships, mind you) then maybe you should bail out because "good" relationships aren't supposed to be this hard.

I think of juxtaposing 500 Days of Summer to The Notebook with a SPLASH of The Time Traveler's Wife and Inception; why you ask?

Because each of these characters had a great love; they had to deal with the loss of that love and/or the decision to stay, even though they knew that at times it would be rough.

I wish I could talk to them, ask them the answers to my questions.

How can you love, and yet wonder like this?

What I really mean to type is...are the struggles worth it? Can there be too many bad times to out weigh the good? Is there such thing as "too many?"

Why is it that we are so willing to forgive our friends for their missteps? Grievances? Mistakes? Selfishness...etc. but not our partners?

My questions may have been asked numerous times; these questions are probably on different blogs, books, etc. around the world. But the interesting thing is, there is no answer.

Sometimes, there is beauty in that unknown, beauty in that chaos.

Well, tonight is NOT that night for that beauty. I want a FUCKING answer, dammit.

because the pain is too Great; the stress can be too painful. And the fall, too steep or hard, to try to pick myself up from, as easily, or if even, again.

What makes a relationship worth staying in? Fighting for?

WHAT?!

When I'm told that "security" matters before anything.
A "good" education.
Commonality...
Ambition....(what if that ambition is merely to be a good father? I use "merely" in the way others would...being a good father isn't something that is just a "mere" task...it is a privilege, honor and incomprehensibly difficult, but most likely rewarding task)

Do these things really matter when we get to the basics? TO the instinctual, spiritual, purity of it?

Does the purity of love exist?

When do you know, a relationship is worth fighting for?

Battle-lines are never drawn straight.