Learning to Love
I, like many others my age, was raised on a diet of pop ballads and movies that taught a generation what love is, or is supposed to be. Love is an emotion, love is desire, love is desperation, love is sex, love is [insert raw feelings here].
Just like all good things in life, we (hopefully) evolve in our understanding of how these things work. Friendship, finances, and a working life are other examples of things we generally don’t have down pat when we’re flailing around in our early years, but we can learn. Love is no different.
To paraphrase Neil Peart, it’s not a love song, and it isn’t fantasy-land.
I had my first relationship when I was 13. I call it a relationship because it was longer than two days, which was about my previous record. Inundated by power ballads and love songs, I thought I was one romantic dude. I had an intensity about this girl, a desperado act that I thought was attractive, and it probably was at the beginning. I thought I was in love, but truthfully, she was just really pretty and I thought finding someone beautiful was love.
Our relationship fell apart after a few months, and true to hormonal fashion, I thought my life was over. Later we became friends, which was an even more important relationship than the romantic one we had before. The biggest lesson I gleaned from her, however, was what love isn’t. Love isn’t shame, or embarrassment, or cruelty, things she had in abundance.
Though, to be fair, maybe I was embarrassing at 13.
My next significant relationship wasn’t for another eight years. I’d had girlfriends and friends over the years, but when I met her, things changed. Mostly, I learned—far too late—that I, like most people, have a dark side, one that I would rather pretend doesn’t exist, but still hides beneath the surface.
In the beginning, I did not treat her well, and we were on-again, off-again friends and lovers for years, until we officially became a couple. I tried to break out my romance skills, things I thought I’d learned over the prior years that constituted the expression of real love I’d hoped I would exude.
But I was a fool. I showed gestures that had the appearance of love, but I did not perform the acts of love that I later learned were the crux of what the word means. I couldn’t. I cooked romantic dinners occasionally, and I acquiesced to some of her demands in our relationship, and said the right things, for awhile. Over time, I took her for granted (and she no doubt did the same to me), and we parted ways. We stayed friends for a long time, but the lessons I needed to learn were, as always, too late in coming.
Why couldn’t I just love her? Because my heart wasn’t in the right place yet. Loving another human being cannot truly begin until we’ve considered what it means to do just that, or until the lesson has become entrenched in our core.
We tend towards expressions of love as simply emotions and desires. “I love you,” however that phrase is put into context, generally means “I want you in my life, I desire your presence, and I care.” Those are all fine and dandy things to say, and they may be true, but they’re only a fraction of the weight real love carries, for they’re all about the person saying them.
Love, however, is more than the person who has those desires and feelings. Love is bigger, love is more encompassing.
Love is really about the person loved, and not the lover.
We became friends just a few years ago, a little over a year after we started working together. I wasn’t attracted to her at first, and honestly, I couldn’t tell you the day I realized I was. Our friendship evolved slowly, and my interest in her grew.
Our backgrounds were similar enough for understanding, though not identical enough that we had nothing to learn from one another. Our senses of humor are of the sarcastic and caustic variety. Though she has a tough shell, she could demonstrate a warmth and softness towards me that I had been missing in my life.
I woke up one day to realize that I was “in love,” whatever that means. I knew that the nature of my interest in her had changed, and that I wanted her to have a more permanent, fixed place in my life. I was also keenly aware that such a thing would never, ever happen. She was in a long-term relationship, and I was “just a friend.”
My acceptance of the situation came quickly, and I resigned myself to reality. I never even planned to tell her of the depth of my admiration, until a friend of mine suggested that it’s better that she know than perhaps, someday, never having the chance to tell her at all.
“Life is short,” he said, in a moment of wisdom. I felt the truth of that. So one night, after she dropped me off at my house after work, I spent the next hour composing an email that would inadequately explain my feelings, and hopefully convey my understanding that nothing would come of it. I just wanted her to know, and maybe I would feel a little lighter, having finally unloaded the burden.
My heart pounded as I pressed the “Send” button. I figured things would just take their course. It took her over a week to reply, for various reasons, but the response I got only solidified that this was someone I wanted to keep in my life… as a friend or anything else she wanted to be.
The next two years were a lesson in what it means to love someone. No romantic relationship I’d been in had really taught me what that means as much as this friendship did. Well aware that we would never be a couple, I still found that we grew closer in our friendship. I knew that I wanted to do things for her, things that I never suspected would result in reciprocated romantic feelings (and they did not). I didn’t do them for me, and because I was directing energy at someone else for their own edification, it felt right. At some point, I recognized that it was because I was putting her needs and happiness higher than my own wants. Not that I met real, basic needs—I wasn’t a provider of shelter or food—but I certainly liked to think that I filled some kind of void, in the way she did for me. There was a connection between us, an understanding, and a support structure that I wasn’t finding elsewhere.
Despite wanting more than a friendship, I found a friendship that was fulfilling and satisfying to me. Being able to show real expressions of caring for another individual in a selfless way provided a light in an otherwise dark cavern of despair I felt about my life.
Love is…
Love isn’t an emotion. There may be all kinds of emotions in the wrapper of “love,” but it isn’t the core of its being. No, love is an act. It is small and large gestures of affection, and deeds of kindness. It is giving of our time, without reservation, and it is unconditional. It is believing in the one you love, and it is seeing the best and worst of them and still loving them just as much. It is choosing those we love over our own greed and our own pride.
Together, those are difficult—perhaps impossible—attributes to live up to. But whether it’s a partner, a friend, or a relative, these are the ideals we strive for, because even under difficult circumstances, this is a defining and shining example of the power of humanity to rise above the messiness of our own lives. For in the end, love is more than the sum of our parts.
