Bruised, Ripe, and Real

Before we proceed, I should inform you that this is not a blog about bananas or any other fruit for that matter. It’s a blog about people and relationships, and everything in between. Consider it a journal, a diary of sorts, a place where I share my unfiltered thoughts. I encourage active reading and am looking forward to hearing your opinion as you explore Ripe Reflections – you can write to me directly on Instagram.

Let’s go back to our subject. People are like ripe bananas. All of us start of green and firm. The moment we go our own way and start navigating life, we turn into attractive yellow fruit. Then, with age and experience we start to slightly bruise and turn mushy until we reach ultimate ripeness where the weight of the life we lived renders us a mushy, brown mess. Experiences leave marks – a bruised ego, fear of commitment, trust issues, and so on. To make matters worse, only a few people are genuinely aware of their mushiness, so when we mindlessly mix with each other, we unwittingly amalgamate into an almost-rotten banana puree.

The people who are aware though are burdened with a completely different dilemma – they are usually the broken-hearted people who end up swearing off intimacy and love altogether, either for a short while or forever. I’ve had friends tell me that they will put a pause on their love lives until they magically find “the one,” or worse, that they’ve given up completely and are no longer searching. In a way, like my friend’s daughter, they’ve decided that the available bananas are too brown and mushy. Perhaps they had eaten too many ripe bananas in the past and now have a bad aftertaste – a sort of lingering, overbearing flavour of marinating sweetness – or it may just be the imperfect, bruised appearance that is putting them off.

This is not to say that everyone who is aware is sitting on the bench – some people know the realities of the dating scene and still choose to participate. In theory, I support the daters. Dating is our gateway to finding love, as we can’t discern if someone is “the one” until we’re romantically involved. Upon closer observation, however, I can’t help but notice that many of the daters are quite cynical in their approach to dating. They are driven by a purpose other than love – a purpose often born out of a still-aching, thick-shelled heart. Some daters are in the game for casual sex only and wear their hearts on their cheeks contributing to the collective banana puree of unaligned expectations and broken hearts, others to avoid loneliness. In a way, the daters are a more selfish version of the broken-hearted – they get involved with other people, but their past relationship trauma doesn’t allow them to see other people as more than just a means to an end.

Until now ripe bananas were presented as inferior bananas. In reality though, a ripe banana is a good banana – it’s sweet and flavourful – and can make a great dessert. The same is true for people – you can have a beautiful relationship with someone who isn’t perfect. In fact, the perfect banana bread isn’t made with flawless bananas, just like the perfect relationship isn’t between two flawless individuals. In both cases, it is an amalgamation of factors that contribute to the final creation. However, our fixation on perfection distorts our judgement. We want someone who fits our mold of perfect, because we are told that our ideal partner will make loving easy (cue “Loving Is Easy” by Rex Orange County), and that love is only real if it’s easy. We have developed a desire to be in perfect relationships with perfect people and it is our obsession that hinders our ability to recognize and receive true love from real, albeit imperfect people. If we want to have fruitful relationships, we need to accept that love is challenging at times and that’s okay. Unlike a career, from which you can retire and still receive benefits, you can't retire from a relationship and expect to receive a pension in the form of affection. Love requires constant effort. We need to accept that for as long as we deny the challenging nature of love, we will continue to miss out.

My ramblings will be incomplete if I don’t address the transformative nature of human relationships. We are dynamic beings, our bodies replacing billions of cells daily, signifying our essence’s constant state of change. This is precisely why we end up bruised and mushy – interactions cannot happen in a frictionless vacuum – we are bound to evolve with experience. We can grow resentful from past heartbreaks like the daters and lose our faith in love, but we can also learn from those experiences and carry those lessons into the future. The truth is you are just as bruised as everyone else, but it doesn’t make you incapable or undeserving of love, and unlike bananas, you have a marvellous ability to heal. What’s the best way to heal, you ask? To start, let people in. There is only so much inner work that can be done, at some point you’ll need to take a leap of faith and try again.