When I was a little girl, I asked my parents if their eyes turned to hearts when they met each other the way that Pepe Le Pew's did whenever he saw Penelope Pussycat. My mom and dad laughed, but to me, it was a serious question. Pepe's aggressive infatuation with Penelope was my first lesson on the concept of love. "Oh, so when I see 'the one', I should look for symptoms of my irises turning into hearts and my heart literally beating out of my chest. Got it," I concluded.
And so for awhile, I didn't necessarily believe in "love at first sight", but I did believe in "love at first spark." To gauge compatibility, I believed there had to be some initial metaphorical fire between us upon our perfect meet-cute. "No spark, no way." I carried this mantra from my Looney Tunes days all the way through my mid-twenties.
And now I realize that I might have missed a lot of opportunities at building a fire with someone just because I thought they lacked that first spark. But now that I'm revisiting that idea, I remember how much it actually takes to build and sustain a fire (not that I've actually built one myself... shout out to all my cousins and friends that never put me in charge of the fire).
This idea of an "initial spark" only allotted me surface-level relationships before deciding I wanted to pursue something more serious. As one of my good friends would say, "Input, output. If shit goes in, shit comes out." And I was doing a shit job at getting to know people before I decided to fangirl about them. As a result, I spent so much time limiting my love life to shitty infatuations, shitty relationships, and even shitty non-relationships.
An initial spark is great, but taking the time and effort to get to know someone is even better. Next time, I'm going to build myself a proper fire, and it's going to burn and burn and burn.