I was in the kitchen making banana bread when my friend offered her five-year-old daughter a banana. The girl looked at the bananas in question and refused – they were too ripe, too spotted, too mushy. I wasn’t terribly devastated, but now I can’t quite enjoy ripe bananas the same way.
A small disclaimer before you proceed, 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 would love to hear from you – write to me directly on Instagram.
Let’s go back to our subject. People are like ripe bananas. We start green and firm, hopeful and a little naive. Time softens and sweetens us and we ripen, earning our first sweet brown spots and imperfections as we dive head first into love. Eventually we reach ultimate ripeness where the weight of the life we lived renders us a mushy, brown mess. We carry the scars of love gone sideways – a hesitation before the first touch, a ghost of a promise that wasn’t kept, the heavy weight of questions left unanswered. To make matters worse, most of us stay oblivious to our bruises, so we blend into a nearly rotten banana puree as we mindlessly love, tangle, and tango.
Those who see their bruises carry a different kind of weight – the ache of choosing between closing off and risking the next fracture. 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 ripe, too bruised, and far too mushy. Perhaps they had too many 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, spotted appearance putting them off.
Others keep dating but with a cynical edge, treating people like placeholders, distractions, or just something to snack on until better things come along. 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. But often, daters are just like the broken-hearted – hopeless about their future romantic prospects, they treat others as pit stops on the way to something else.
This is the dilemma of modern dating – we are standing in a kitchen full of spotted bananas and everyone is insisting that they only want a perfect yellow one. Are we doomed? Not quite, we have two things to consider: the search for perfection and the transformative nature of human relationships.
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, hindering our ability to recognize and receive true love from real, albeit imperfect people. Instead, we need to accept that perfect yellow bananas don’t exist and that overripe bananas are good bananas – they’re sweet and flavourful – and can make a great dessert. People are the same. Beautiful relationships don’t come from flawless people; they come from imperfect ones willing to show up anyway.
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 brown and mushy – interactions cannot happen in a frictionless vacuum – we are bound to evolve with experience. Bruises may be inevitable and past relationships can leave us bitter, but they can also leave us wiser, sharper, better able to build something lasting. The only real requirement is letting people in. Bruises mean you’ve lived – and if someone can’t handle that, they were never hungry for you in the first place.
On a side note, could you share your banana bread recipe with me?