The Big Idea

As an editor at a magazine for budding entrepreneurs who are working diligently to make their business successful, I spend a lot of time researching industries and companies on the rise. I find myself engrossed in stories of people who had the courage and the determination to make everything out of absolutely nothing.

Or perhaps not nothing, but rather – one hell of a big idea.

While we may not all have the guts to invest our own money or ensure someone else our idea is worth their risk, the minute we decide to place our feelings on the line – we all become entrepreneurs. Very niche owners of the matters of our hearts in the business of prospecting, attracting, and investing in love. And while we’d all like to think the return will inevitably be high, like all zany and unpredictable game changers that never quite make sense on paper (or far too much sense) – there is never a guarantee that what we put into a relationship will be just as much or possibly more than what we get back.

But more than being players who sometimes win big and lose largely when taking a chance on a suitor who may not be suitable – the definition of a relationship is based on an idea. It’s a perspective we each create for ourselves. It’s personal. It’s the accumulation of the experiences, the people, the triangles, and the jungles we’ve weeded through to end up where we are. How you see a relationship may not look the same through my eyes, and vice versa. What constitutes as love and what it feels like to be madly, happily entangled with another person may not feel the same to me as it does to you. All relationships may be different, but so are the people who find themselves attempting (or avoiding) entering them.

Yet, there’s a thing we all have in common – our willingness and our relentless spirit to defend that big idea. That big love. That something that I can’t put into words that makes us all desire and go after this romantically inclined bliss. That yearning to meet someone who just gets us, who we can lounge with as easily as we can lay with them. That sense of comfort that also translates into passion and shared interests and a path to pursue together.

And that idea we will defend with every ounce of energy we have. We’ll go to war on its behalf. We’ll vow to stand by it, no matter how hard it tries to knock us down or take away the wind that keeps us alive. We’ll go against any advice, any warning, any red flag, any anything that attempts to steer us away from what we perceive as that big love.

However, what we forget is that what we’re putting up arms and raising our guns for isn’t actually real. We may believe in it more than we believe in ourselves, we may ache for it in places that have always seemed broken, and we may convince ourselves that this person, this man, makes the dreams we had a pleasant reality.

Really, finding the big love is actually just putting a physical form to a big idea.

But getting caught up in the search for the big love to give life to a big idea keeps us in a constant state of projecting. Regardless if we mean to do it (I doubt we do) or not, when dating or mating or both – we will continuously wonder if this dude fits into the plan. If he acts in a way, comes across in a way, looks at us in a way, makes us feel in a way, is in a way – the answer to the big idea. The funding in our hearts that takes the thought and the visualization out of our heads and onto the streets. On his knees. At the altar.

And by seeing if he fits the bill or hits the mark, we stop concentrating on what’s more important than an idea and frankly, more important than love. We lose sight of the man. The consideration isn’t if he fits into a mold we’ve created or has the bank account we dreamed of or is precisely over 6’0″. The question is – do we care?

I once had drinks with an older woman who liked my blog and wanted to give me some advice. Being the inquisitive person I am, I agreed and she, of course, said something that stuck with me. Having been happily married to her husband for over 30 years, she told me that their relationship wasn’t her idea of love. It wasn’t what she was looking for or what she thought she’d find. It went against any rule she set out and this man, wasn’t the guy she pictured herself with in the long run. They had their complications and their issues, but they picked each other. And when she fell for him, when she “just knew’ – she stopped caring about her idea of love.

Because after all the work is put in, the blueprints are constructed, the desires are marketed and tested, the industry is made well-aware of availability, and investments and bets are placed – that’s when the business has to run. Or the relationship.

And nothing can become successful or be profitable in love, without having the ability to take a step back and realizing that what matters the most isn’t the idea. It’s our ability to accept that even the best of ideas, the most well-intended of plans, sometimes take us in a completely different way. Like a business plan that is meant to be an ever-evolving piece of literature that guides a company but doesn’t dictate it – to keep that big love around, we’ve gotta be able to change our minds.

And perhaps, let us come up with an even better and bigger idea.