Head over heels in LOVE

My mom recently told me one of the biggest truths of life that she had learned: that the most difficult thing to handle isn't motherhood nor jobs/careers, rather the relationships we keep. She says motherhood, although it requires a huge amount of effort and patience, is never as nerve-wracking and emotional as handling love affairs. 

Imagine this, you meet a stranger with a completely different upbringing and background, different views in life, and you allow them to enter your lives, live with them, marry them, start a family together. How do you deal with the polarities? How do you live the rest of your lives together? And then, when do you know that it isn't working? That things just have to end? Which ones will you still try to work out and hold on to? Which ones do you have to stop?

These are the things that actually bother us humans more than anything. Yeah, sure, once or twice in our lives we'd be preoccupied with school, work issues, raising kids, or the mundane things. But nothing takes as much space in our minds as pondering our latest love lives.

As Elizabeth Gilbert in "Eat, Pray, Love" wonderfully narrates: 

From Eat, Pray, Love chapter 50:

And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering? “But don’t you know,” Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?” It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do… This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?” Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.