What is Passion?

I just recently finished a book by one of my favorite authors, Jane Green.  It's the second time I've read it. She's a British novelist, and maybe it's my own roots coming out, but her sense of humor enlightens me.  I've found myself giggling in my own bed at the witty way she words things and is able to capture the life of a single-woman on the move in her career and navigating the dating world.  Oddly enough, they always seem to relate to my life.

 

The most recent book of hers I read was called, "Straight Talking." If you haven't read it...

 

Stop here.

 

Go no further.

 

Pick it up! -- it's cheap, easily read, and it'll give you a laugh...I promise.

 

I won't give you a synopsis, as I think you should read it, but I will tell you that it got me thinking about something in particular: passion.  

 

Everything in the novel stems from the quote by William Wharton - 'What is love? As far as I can tell, it is a passion, admiration and respect. If you have two you have enough. If you have all three, you don't have to die to go to heaven.'
 

To me, passion has always been something that's required in a relationship.  I long for it, in the way that a lot of women I know do.  I've never been a relationship fiend because I find passion very few and far between when it comes to people I truly connect with.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't the little girl who grew up dreaming of her wedding day.  However, it's never been something I've wanted to rush into with just anyone.  Passion, to me, was a vital part of a relationship.  It was the butterflies, the can't eat, can't speak, reach for the stars kind of love.  I wanted a man who was so passionate about me, he made me forget that the rest of the world existed.  What I've learned as I got older is that passion can be disguised as lust or addiction.

 

Straight Talking - Jane Green

 

There have been a handful of times that I've been fooled by passion in disguise.  Sometimes that disguise lasts only a matter of hours, other times, it's lasted years.

 

Since passion was necessary to me, I determined that it was those highs and lows that kept all of my relationships on an emotional rollercoaster.  That was my definition of passion.  That this man that had treated me like dirt and suddenly come to his senses and realized that I was 'the one,' the special gal he'd waited all of his life for.  Needless to say this emotional cycle is never-ending and really was it passion after all? Probably not.  It was an addiction, a need for that bad-boy who kept my heart pumping, racing, and always on the edge of my seat.  Because it was so tense, almost volitile at times I viewed it as passion.

 

“And I loved him, Jesus how I loved him. It wasn’t love of course, even I can see now that it was infatuation, but at the time it near enough killed me. It’s so passionate, so intense, so painful, that even years afterward you still feel the hurt when you hear their name.” - Straight Talking, Jane Green.

 

Sometimes passion is just the opposite of what you think it may be.  Sometimes it's finding comfort in the fact that you know the person you've chosen to spend your life with is simply put, always going to be there for you.  If you have comfort in that, you can find the passion in such a beautiful love. 

 

That's something I'll have to teach myself.  Passion doesn't mean intense highs, lows and extremes. While I do deem all 3, admiration, respect and passion, necessary parts of a lasting relationship, I think we can define those three words in our ways; in ways that suit what we're looking for in a lifelong parter.

 

So, what is passion to you? Do you find it necessary to have passion in a relationship and would you end a relationship because their's not enough of the passion that you're looking for?

 

 

xoxo,

A.