After a lifetime of searching to no avail for that special someone, Milton Jones of Nashville, Tennessee, questioned whether love was real but, in an internal pun that amused him, decided that it “really” is.
“Puns often go unnoticed or at least unappreciated, but I do my best to catch even the subtlest versions,” he said. “And in this case, it paid off in spades.”
Jones explained that when it came to love, he had gotten lost in wondering whether it “really” did or did not exist - until it occurred to him that he could pretty much stop his questioning there.
“”Real’ was already in the sentence, albeit in adverb form,” he said. “I decided that for once in my life, I could let go of the quest for the perfect descriptor and let the adverb stand on its own. Granted, it’s a little awkward grammatically, but this is about more than grammar. Way more.”
After definitively deciding for once and for all the question of whether love was really real (yes!), Jones put his new working theory to the test by striking up a conversation with an attractive woman he encountered at his local health food store, where he shops for purple sweet potatoes, which, he reported, have been hard to find lately.
Unfortunately, the potatoes were indeed again out of stock, and the woman herself proved to be a bit standoffish. Nevertheless, while running that grocery errand, Jones realized that he loves purple sweet potatoes - still more evidence of the reality of love, and pootentially of the truism that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
All told, Jones reports finding his day-to-day life if not probative of, at least consistent with, the reality of love – which he says is good enough for him.
“Correlation doesn’t equal causation," he noted. "But sometimes, you take what you can get.”
