The Love You Give vs. The Love You Get
How it often doesn’t equal out
In most relationships, love is never balanced equally. It seems there is always one partner who loves the other more. I’m rarely that partner.
Due to childhood trauma, attachments are not something that I look for in life, nor are they easily made. I’ve got people that have been constants in my life for years that are still not much more to me than acquaintances.
Love, for me, is not moonlit nights or promises of undying affection. Love, for me, is an action verb.
I’m stingy with my emotions; rarely am I willing to invest the emotional energy to get myself worked up. Even getting angry is a rare event, and for people who are endless founts gushing forth with emotional expression, I am often confused and slightly appalled when forced to witness overt displays of emotion from them.
I find it tiring, and messy. Much like I find most demonstrative displays of emotion.
I keep the people in my life that I can truly say I love down to a minimum. I see some people that appear to collect friends, and loved ones, and I don’t see how they do it. I hear people that proclaim to “Love Everybody”, and all I can think is “Why? Why would you ever want to do a stupid thing like that?”
I, for one, do not love everybody. If anything, I find the concept bizarre and faintly offensive. I don’t have it in me. And most times, I’m not sure who that makes the broken one, me or them.
I have a very good friend, that I’ll refer to as R. R is married, but he and his wife often goes outside of their marriage for sexual interests. He refers to his wife and her various boyfriends often, and it’s something that I asked him about recently.
He summed it up to me perfectly. He said that sometimes, he is the one who loves the most, and it is those times that his love carries them.
Other times, she is the one that has to love the most, and in those times it is her love that gets them through. While I don’t necessarily understand the dynamics of their relationship, I find the sentiment lovely, and honest.
I don’t know how to love like others say they do. I’ve never been inclined to do so. I have no desire to love the entire world, but for the few and far between that have wormed their way past my barriers and boundaries, I love them with a fierceness that no one can match, and that no one can destroy.
