How many of us have fallen in love with people on paper and found, to our utter dismay, that we had been waylaid by misunderstanding—either having woefully deceived ourselves or ruefully been deceived?
Ironically, most parties do not ever truly intend to do so, for they are either simply stretching the fabric of truth, or rewriting what is unwritten, all to ensure that we are smitten, at least for a while, with them. But, as the philter usually wears thin and eventually proves stripped of its initial allure, love often proves to be one of the heart’s greatest deceivers.
And so, love is also one of life’s greatest paradoxes.
For in the process of one’s pining and subsequent search, one is apt to adopt and adapt with rules that are written whilst we play the game. Ironically, much the same, we want those we play with to follow the rules solely as we perceive and conceive them. In the end love ends up being a sticky entanglement of such double-standards, because at the same time we expect our lovers to play by our rules we also expect them to evolve into the exceptions to all the rules we have ever written.
In other words, we expect these elusive exceptions—those extra ordinary, extraordinary, exceptional avatars of our desire—to exceed and belie our own purported expectations; to woo us and make us woe; swoon and swell and sway so much so that we will eventually betray our own stubborn dispositions because of that certain-something of theirs which makes us curl our toes, and alas, blows our long-standing standards out of still water.
Moreover, simultaneously we often find ourselves vying (if not begging) to likewise be the exception—because since we are all beholden to the fact that we are but meager humans, mortals trying to outrun life itself by having love spin an uplifting mix of meaning into the music of our daily travails, we often struggle to express ourselves as the individuals we are as well. For even though women are from Venus and men are all the same, our souls are still prone to shamelessly seek some outstanding recognition.
Hence, abyssus abyssum invocat, one misstep leads to another. For to play the game, you yourself must be an ox y moron (stalwart, yet gullible)—that is, to exert yourself as an exceptional player who plays by the rules, even if exceptional players never do.
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