The Strength of Will

I’m creating a sound track of songs, and one that landed there is Loving You Against My Will by Gary Allen. I’ve listened to it repeatedly – I mean REPEATEDLY – and it got me thinking.

Bad, I know.

Can you love someone against your will? Or was your “will” simply seeking out an echo, a sound that matched itself and found it, even if by accident?

Two people with so much conflict, perhaps too much conflict, and yet the vortex pulls them in anyway, despite those obstacles. Perhaps because of them. I know we read and write about characters who have to face conflict after conflict after conflict, each harsher than the one prior, but at what point is it TOO much conflict? At what point do you stop and realize, “No way in hell”?

But there’s that promise of things to come, right? It’ll get better. There’s a reward at the end of all that pain, all that conflict, if you just hang in there long enough, if you’re patient enough.

Those promises.

Those dreams.

And even when the conflicts leave those dreams unrealized, even after promise after promise goes unfulfilled, they still love, they still need, they still CRAVE. Is that the point you’re really loving against your will?

I read and write romance because I believe in the Happily Ever After. I believe that if the love is pure, if the love is real, if the deep pulse of heartbeats match, it doesn’t matter how cruel the conflict. It can’t be contained, nor can it be controlled to meet the needs of everyone else around you. It just has to BE. You can ignore it, you can run from it, you can attempt to make others around you what you want them to be, you can do everything you can to ignore that true, pure love but in the end, it happens. Period.

There is no compromise.

There is no “Kinda Happily Ever After” for a reason.