Halfloves - It’s Easy to Love

Got this story from Iowa City’s Jeff Roalson about marriage, dance, music, and self-love:

Hello Mark,

I’ve always loved music and dance. When I was only 5 years old my grandma enrolled me in dance lessons. I kept dancing and performing consistently for the following 12 or 13 years and even had the pleasure of dancing in France for 3 years of my youth. The past several years haven’t involved much dance partially due to an increased involvement in music. I’ve been playing music for about 10 years, many of which have been spent with some of the same guys I currently play with in the band Halfloves. The past 3 years have been some of the most tumultuous, life-shaping years I’ve ever been dealt and though there’s some dark times in the past and most assuredly more trials in the future, I wouldn’t trade the past few years for anything and am really happy with life.

I got married in summer of 2013 to my long time girlfriend. Things seemed to be awesome. We had both just graduated college (23 and 21 years old), went on a great honeymoon to Europe, came back to the States. 6 months after our wedding she cooly tells me she wants a divorce. I try to work things out but to no avail. She leaves and I bury myself in writing and music. Lots of bad songs mainly. Things that meant a lot but had been said a million times. Just kind of a self-therapy that helped me work though a lot of things that didn’t make sense. It was a weird time where I came more to terms with the sometimes scary realization that we aren’t in control of our lives as much as we’d like to believe - even with the big things.

I kept writing music and eventually wrote this song that’s not an anti-romance song but rather something that touches on the fact that when we’re looking for love, we (people in general) oftentimes are much more concerned with loving ourselves than each other. Lots of us adopt the “treat yo’self” mentality in regard to the way we view our personal relationships.

If we had to show the specific ways we “love” the people who are close to us in our lives I realized we often share the bad things we refrain from doing rather than things that show actual love. Essentially, I realized that refraining from doing shitty things to each other doesn’t mean that gap is filled with love. This song is called “It’s Easy to Love” because it’s easy to love yourself (or at least the nice parts about yourself) and it’s easy to just love the idea of love (is that too chic-flick-y of me?) without filling the gaps in our relationships with something real - something that can be felt and readily identified.

I’ve been thinking about making love real in my relationships (romantic or platonic) and the past year has been really great. If you’re feeling like your relationships with people are getting dull, call your dad or make a point to talk about something real with your significant other instead of half-heartedly asking each other how their day at work was before gluing your eyes to your phone for the rest of dinner. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this song and can appreciate the simplicity of two people doing improvised dance in front of an old prison.

Thanks, Mark!

-Jeff

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.