What's Scarier Than Banana Spiders? Love, That's What.

A very wise friend of mine once said, "You know, we preach about 'love' all of the time, all of us do, but we are each terrified of romantic love."

I jumped. I mean, I quite literally stumbled back and, I think I shrieked like a little Thai girl over that truth bomb. Not only does talk of romantic love threaten my ice heart, it also scares the shit out of me - more than zombie apocalypse...or Banana Spiders. Yeah...Banana Spiders...romantic love scares me more than Banana Spiders. I'm not even fucking around; Thailand has big ass Banana Spiders that hang out in doorways or over footpaths that look like this guy -

 
Holy shit, right? Well, it almost scared me enough just looking up images of arachnids to steer me off the whole love topic, but I'm going to attempt to run with this idea before the organ in my chest thaws out.

So, yeah. I'm obsessed with love. I love love! I LOVE my family and friends so much it hurts sometimes. I love my sister unconditionally and as if she is the other half of me. I love my parents. I love life and the universe. I love Thailand. I love spicy food. I love nature and...well, you get the idea.

But, romantic love? Well...I'm not sure about that one.

Truthfully, after my friend bombed me with the observation about romantic love, I was feeling a little bewildered. I stopped and asked myself, "Do I know anything at all about love? Am I just some kind of love phoney?" Well, I hope that I'm not totally lost in the whole love category, but I am also baffled by love in many senses. I'll never forget this one time during my senior year of college - I was in class with my favorite professor, Joel Olsen, and we were discussing the uniqueness of parent-child relationships. Joel asked the class something like, "What is different about the love between a parent and a child? What makes their relationship so unique - unlike any other?"

The class was silent. We all shifted around a little bit and no one ventured a guess to the kind of question that seemed pretty incomprehensible for the group of early twenty somethings to wrap their minds around. There was a girl in my class, a beautiful girl who I'd always been a little bit in awe with - she was cute and petite, with an unexpected half sleeve tattoo of a woman. One day, she came into class and I noticed that she was pregnant, very pregnant, and it blew my mind. Hey, I was in college here - rarely was I ever around pregnant people or pregnant people who wanted to be pregnant people. She was just this edgy and cool girl, and then an edgy and cool pregnant girl who I had a lot of respect for. I never really knew how I felt about it; it was interesting to me and well, she had just had her baby at the time when the class sat there with blank faces, waiting for Joel to feed us the answer to his weighty question. This girl replied in an almost whisper - barely audible, but loud enough to cut through the stillness of the classroom, "Unconditional love."

It was beautiful. It gave me shivers and still moves me to this day. Unconditional love.

I remember wondering, "What establishes love like that? Is it hours of labor? Is it 9 months of carrying a baby? How do you get to love like that? Is it the years, the distance, the vulnerability, or just simply a decision that we make, a conclusion we reach deep within ourselves, which solidifies love - unconditionally?"

For a twenty something traveler (and an 8 year old at that) in a country obsessed with unrequited love, the whole concept of romance and love feels more like a handicap or a dramatic film. Add zombies or Banana Spiders to a story about handicaps or emotionally draining cinematic adventures and you've got something pretty terrifying and all around fucked up...

Maybe this is why I keep running.