Where I disagree with Dan Savage

[Edit: You should see this expansion post and clarification that will post 1/28 @ 0930 EST.]

I disagree with Dan Savage on one major thing.

I think that The Princess Bride was right. There is true love. There is a “the one” for you.

“This is true love – you think this happens every day?”

I had convinced myself that true love was a storybook idea back around the turn of the century. That it was an idea that people told themselves….and then pretended that they’d found, when they’d really found “good enough”.

And I had found, I thought, “good enough”. 

Nevermind that I was wrong, that the rounding up I was doing was far greater than I thought. Nevermind any of that.

Because, years later, I found out that true love did exist.

There was no after-the-fact retconning of “at first sight”. It was there from the first moment I saw her. I had found “the one” for me.

But here’s the thing that the movie version of The Princess Bride doesn’t tell you, but the book does:

True love doesn’t mean everything works out automatically.

There were problems – many of them of my making. And I thought they’d go away and be unimportant, because true love, right? This was something that most people never got to feel.

And I was wrong. The problems built and became greater. The fears grew, because so few people actually experience true love, and the emotions are so fucking overwhelming.

And I screwed it up.

So I’m writing this blog post now for two reasons:

1) To assure you that true love is real, and once you know it, you will never be able to settle for “rounding up” again.

2) To tell you that if you do find true love, that you do not take it for granted. It requires as much … no, it requires more work than the regular kind. Because it is terrifying as much as it is exhilarating. And trying to do that work after you’ve screwed it up is so, so much harder than doing it right the first time ’round.