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Some people envision love like a Chagall painting: the graceful bride and groom, floating in the sky, surrounded by airborne chairs, and the thrilling celebration of a couple dancing through life together, supported by the winds of fate, tradition, and family.

The density of the artists colors suggest a far more human and passionate dance. Life in love as a bloody , heart rending, tango. Because that is what love is and that is what we think of love when we think of falling into it.

I’ve always been amused by the phrase “ falling in love” because when I think of falling, I think of injury. Bruised, painful, deeply colored and purple and fading Crimson. The phrase makes me smile because it contains contradictions, both of which make you feel something deeply. You fall? You break. You fall? You hurt yourself! You fall? You fling yourself into the air never knowing where you’ll land or how hard that landing will be.

But then there’s the sweet yearning feelings of wanting to be surrounded and comforted by the arms of the person you’ve fallen in love with: surely, you think, all the injury will be worth it, because that person, how they look, how they smell, how they taste, and how they feel areworth every inch of that journey through space and time.

I recently fell in my own driveway and broke my wrist and my right ankle. I truly fell and as I was going through space thinking, “ good God I’ve just fallen, and I am about to land”, I did not feel like a Chagall painting, but rather like a lurid headline for tomorrow’s papers. I remember thinking “this can’t be happening, please don’t let this be happening” but it was, it did, and I broke. Falling at age 75 does not feel good, I discovered. That cold garage floor was hard.

On the other hand, if one is brave and enjoys that sort of thing, then jumping out of an airplane, confident that the parachute will hold, wafting through mid air. Could be fun, I suppose. But the pivotal thing? The parachute.

Most young people, myself definitely included in my early days, do not have very strong parachutes, and so when we fell, the ground did not greet us kindly. So no matter how glorious the feelings of love and sexual excitement were, when the jump was complete, when the crash or the affair ended, it always hurt.

It took me decades to mature and grow my personal parachute. And now I can say I have a pretty strong one, but what I had to go through to get it? Well, let’s just say if you asked me, I could write a book. But couldn’t we all?

If love does make the world go round, then falling is as integral part of the process as kissing. Unavoidable. Sad at times, but extremely valuable because it teaches us how to nurture safety within us. And it is that safety within that makes us feel safe ultimately with the person we are meant to love.
Frankly, if I asked myself to go back to my 20s and 30s and into my 40s and even my 50s, I would say no, because it all was so full of the revelations and pain of personal growth. But now after 20 years with the right man, I’m glad for those early falls…. As glad for the bruises as I was for the kisses.

For if we didn’t fall in love, what in the hell would we have to write about?
Falling…… injuring…… crying…. Laughing…… kissing…. Locking the door behind him…… it all happens within the same body of the person lucky enough to experience it all.