Love Might Not Matter
Part One of a New Series: Different Love
Love.
What is it? Does it matter?
After years in and out of relationships, watching friends and family navigate their loves and losses, and interacting with friends in online groups, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that most of us don’t know much about it or what it means.
Obviously, love matters in big ways. We love to be in love, and we avoid heartbreak. We are devastated when love doesn’t work out. But maybe, just maybe, love doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. Maybe what we are calling love is really something different.
It’s as though someone decided to let us loose in the world with this crazy goal of finding and keeping love and I’m not sure many of us know what it is or how to do it in a healthy way. We’re running around, damaging ourselves and trampling other people like the pursuit of this vague dream is all that matters.
Most of us grow up with a skewed idea of what love is. We’re shown the fairytales and savior/victim stories — like, “Oh hey! I don’t know who TF you are, but why don’t you rescue me from this tower so I can spend the rest of my goddamn life asking how you could forget the milk again.”
For love to be such a dominant theme/goal of a happy adulthood, we really get a shitty education on it.
In movies or in our families, we see the expectations and the obligations that come along with relationships. The fighting and icy standoffs. The real-life people who look at each other and wonder why in the hell they are still sleeping in the same bed as a person who can make *that sound* while they chew.
We see the failures and heartbreaks. The betrayals. The secrets and affairs and addictions… and even then, we somehow think there is a big romance in getting to the other side. We’ve been taught that real love will always win or should overcome any obstacle or forgive any asshole with poor decision-making skills.
We’re flying blind to a very specific, yet awfully unclear, destination with a crappy map, no real itinerary, and no return flight.
We only know we want to chase the high and avoid the hurt. We don’t want the obligations but still run towards commitments. We chase a title or marriage or romance like it is The Finish Line but forget what it can feel like at the end of a race; fucking exhausting, dirty. It’s hard work and the highs can be ridiculously short-lived. We often say we’d never do it again.
I’m not sure we know how to love. We don’t know what to do to build something healthy beyond good sex or chemistry. We don’t communicate honestly. We hide the ugly parts of ourselves and hope someone will think that we’re just the pieces we’ve shown. And sometimes that isn’t even real because we are too busy trying to be what someone else wants as opposed to who we really are.
We don’t know how to maintain.
We don’t know how to actively love someone or even actively love ourselves.
What if the rest of a relationship is no longer useful to us or worse, dysfunctional — it’s painful or dead or the trust is gone? Or, what if we are totally different people leading completely different lives and slamming into each other like puzzle pieces we can’t make fit?
Then what on earth are we hanging onto?
Why do we envision the ending of this thing that isn’t working or that is screwing up our lives as something that will destroy us? Why do we fear that letting go will derail our lives so spectacularly we won’t know who we are anymore without this “love” in our lives?
So often, a friend will need to talk it out. They may start by venting the latest event — the thing that caused that fight or the hurt. Soon they’re vomiting the day to day pain they are living. Every single betrayal. It’s all lying there in their laps, a pile of hurt and shame and regret.
They aren’t respected or valued, aren’t being seen or appreciated. They have no sex lives anymore or have partners sleeping with everyone but them. They don’t want to be kissed. They would rather sleep than spend time with their partners. They would rather be anywhere but where their partners are. They are living the relationships they said they would never have.
They are trapped in marriages like their parents had or they unwittingly found someone just like their dad or ex or abuser.
When I ask the obvious question, “What are you staying for?” the answer is inevitably, “Love.”
This is all a tragedy, because love can be one of the best experiences, but only when we are in the act of loving and being loved, not when we are using it as a label, excuse, or dysfunctional attachment.
And this is what I’m working on now. After a failed long-term relationship, lots of short-lived romances, a fifteen-year *something* with The One That Got Away, and a divorce, it’s probably time to do things differently.
What do I need to have a positive experience with love and relationships and not a series of encounters that are forced or dysfunctional and destined to fail? What happens if I question things rather than running towards them without thinking or away from them when they feel too real?
The purpose of this isn’t to get you to abandon your relationships or for those in abusive situations to leave unsafe situations without a safety plan. PLEASE do not take this as THAT. It is also not to say that the emotional component of love — the Big Feels — aren’t exciting or don’t feel good or don’t have a place. Love as a feeling is something that we all seem driven to find. It is important to us.
The purpose of this is to take you with me as I figure out how to love in a healthier way, and to ask you to think about what love really is, what it means, and if it is useful in your current situation.
Is it real? Do you really love this person? Why? Do you love who this person is? Who you are when you’re with this person? What does it look like when someone loves you? Is it a feeling they have? Is it something that makes you feel safe to grow and live your life?
Are you loving actively? If love is a verb rather than a vague feeling, is it active in your relationship? What kinds of things show love? Caring? Compassion? Attachment? Support? Passion? Intimacy?
I don’t have all of the answers, but I do have important questions.
At what point do we look at what we are experiencing in our lives and whether or not we want to live them? Are we actively loving the other person? Are we actively loving ourselves and looking out for our highest good?
What if, instead of staying indefinitely in situations that are no longer serving us, we learn to peacefully let go, even if making that peace is painful. What if, instead of staying where we feel stuck or staying where it hurts to live, we let people go and practice loving — actually loving — as a verb and not a random feeling.
What if we stay in relationships that can be fixed and work on actively loving vs covering our shortcomings and transgressions with “love” like a blanket of denial to be thrown over broken promises and shattered hopes.
What if, rather than living with our heads in the sand, hoping for a better future and avoiding the reality we are renting, we decide to take an active role in our lives, accept what is, and deal with THAT.
Can you love someone and still leave them?
Can you wish things had gone differently and still let go?
Can you have a whole history and still walk away, looking for a different future?
I guess my hope is that you can. That we can. That love as an excuse doesn’t have to be the thing we cling to, and that love in action is what we start learning to do.
I still have more questions than answers, and maybe that is more important. Maybe it’s more important that we are thinking about this and we’re questioning the love in our lives rather than accepting it as a reason to stay at all costs.
What do you think?
