paramours

There is a line from the award-winning 1997 play Closer that I truly like:

"There's a moment!" Alice Ayres, a 20-year old American stripper, shouts angrily at her unfaithful boyfriend Dan, a British writer. Dan had just confessed about his affair with another woman. It just happened, he says.

It was a dark, piercing scene. I totally agree with Alice. Nothing just happens.

In anything we do in life, I truly believe that there's a brief moment that allows us to think...to decide if we're going to turn around or go for it anyway.

Love affairs happen because we deliberately ignore these moments. We let those little warnings inside our heads fall on deaf ears. We erase the images of our loving families waiting for us back home. We let ourselves be swept away by the unknown. We play with fire and play it wild.

Before we know it, we find ourselves trapped in a situation we could not get out of. We're caught in a web of complicated relationships, hurting our paramour, our life partner and children, if we have any, and ourselves.

It takes a whole lot of energy, strength, wisdom and pain to stay in such entanglements. We take each day as it comes, trying to avoid having to choose just one among many relationships. We live in lies and deceit because we are selfish and insensitive.

Oh, but as Alice says, "there's a moment!"

If only we can find the strength to use that moment to think and stop ourselves and to just go back and just remain faithful to that one relationship we want to keep, live and grow old in, the world would be a better place.

As noted author Leo Buscaglia said “What love we’ve given, we’ll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.”