Practicing the ART of Love

On love as devotion and tenderness as strength

If I were asked to define art, I would say it is the pure expression of the heart. To create art is to be truly exposed. It is to disrobe under a full moon in the open and to allow your scars and stretch marks to softly speak, each one a sentence of what you have gracefully overcome. It is flaunting the features you are most insecure about, the very features that make you so unique and breathtakingly beautiful.

To create art is to gently place your unfiltered tenderness into your audience's hands and give them the power to decide what to do with it. Some people may deeply resonate with it and find immense solace in your art, and some people may find it distasteful and unsatisfying. The audience's negative feedback does not immediately deem your art as bad; it just means they prefer a different type of art. Just like how some people prefer rock music to jazz, it does not take away the value and sacredness of a slow jazz song.

My favorite form of art is loving a person romantically. This art demands a worship of their mind and soul, religiously. Romantic love is an endless paradox, desiring them perpetually, even as their mere existence quiets every hunger. Your partner is both the question and the answer, the medicine to the sickness. This sacred art requires tenderness and complete devotion, for a person is fragile like glass; they reflect light when tended to carefully, but when held carelessly, they shatter.

To love a person is a radical act. It requires laying your pride onto the altar and sacrificing it repeatedly. To love them romantically is to defy the rule book. It is not about dominance or leadership. Rather, it is about complete surrender. It is to dissolve into their glory and light, to yearn for their soft whispers, to honor their soul within every breath of this short life. To surrender is not to disappear. You remain, arguing, aching, messy, whole. Love does not ask you to shrink. Instead, it asks you to be tender with all that you are. In this religion, it is required to unlearn harmful ideas about strength and toughness, and to choose vulnerability and delicacy.

So, grab your canvas and begin this exceptionally fine art. Create with tenderness and uncaged passion. Paint softly, and fiercely, with every stroke of desire. Surrender fully to the process. Ditch the brushes of control and embrace the mess. Cry and laugh through the process. This masterpiece is not about perfection, and it never will be; rather, it is about your partner being reflected in you. So go ahead, paint, and let every stroke declare that romantic love is indeed an art.