Five Things That Love Isn’t
Since today is Valentine’s Day, I’d be remiss not to post about the subject of the day, which is love. However, this will not be a sappy post about the commercialized holiday. I am in love with love, but the real stuff – not the sugary stuff that the storybooks and romantic comedies would like us to believe.
Instead, this is about the real, raw, honest, and sometimes painful thing known as love. Which is, in fact, way better than that silly commercialized thing anyway. Trust me. To read more about that, you should check out pages 11-12 of the most recent publication of Mag Pie magazine, for my essay “What Is Love.” I think we can all agree that love is a lot of wonderful things, but there are just as many things that it is not. For this reason, today I will be going over five things that love most certainly is not.
What It’s Not
1. Love isn’t perfect.
We all mess up, a lot. When two imperfect people who stand against adversity and over and over refuse to give up on one another, that is love. Because if we expect love to be perfect, our relationships aren’t going to last. This is perhaps why some people seem to hop from relationship to relationship, like a hummingbird flitting from one flower to another. Constantly searching, yet never finding. Because while most of us know how to fall in love, we don’t all know how to stay in love.
I often think of this quote by Brene Brown because it captures that fear of not being enough (aka Atelophobia) that many of us sometimes experience:
“We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people, but we’re afraid to let them see it in us. We’re afraid that our truth isn’t enough – that what we have to offer isn’t enough without the bells and whistles, without editing, and impressing.”
If you find someone that embraces you along with all your faults and clumsy baggage and you feel that exact same way about that person – hold on to that, because it’s rare and difficult to come by.
2. Love isn’t easy.
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is not. More like, it’s crazy difficult. Even more so, it’s 100% a choice. Every year, month, day, minute, and second brings an opportunity and a decision whether to stay or go. It is possible to flip off those feelings of love, like a figurative light switch or a snuffing out of a flame. The following quote by Horacio Jones is spot on:
“People don’t magically stay in love for years or decades. After the first few months (when your spark or chemistry is control of your emotions), love is a choice that you make every single day, and when you stop making the choice to love, you start falling out of love right away.”
Got it. So, we’ve established it’s not easy. The real question is, will you decide to stay or to go?
3. Love isn’t dependency.
Dependency is driven out of fear. It is a kind of crazed neediness that occurs from holding on too tight. You can’t hold onto love. If that love wants to leave, it’ll leave. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong wanting to be around someone. That is critical for love to bloom. But needing to be around someone is a whole other story. That pushes into crossing the line to an addiction, which isn’t healthy. Therefore, while it’s perfectly healthy to depend on each other, it’s important to not let ourselves be dependent upon each other. Otherwise, we find ourselves at a place where our happiness depends on our significant other, and you can imagine the rough roads that leads to. Yes, it is healthy to experience the all-important feelings of passion and excitement when you are with your person, but you need to have your own identify and be secure enough in yourself to be without that person too.
4. Love isn’t the same as lust.
You see someone walk into the room and – boom! We’ve all felt that. Is it love at first site? Not so much. That feeling is lust. The pace love develops between people varies greatly and there is no right or wrong amount of time. For some it is extremely quick while for others it is a slow bloom. However, the key word here is that it “develops”. Lust can certainly develop into love, but it is not one and the same. That spark of lust, if it is not cared for properly, can promptly be extinguished, as quickly as it appeared.
Lust is fleeting and circumstantially based, but real love is lasting and unconditional.
5. Love isn’t always enough.
Despite the best of intentions, sometimes love just isn’t enough. This can raise the defense mechanisms for some of us, because after all, we’re taught from a young age that love can conquer all. Unfortunately, time in life will teach us that sometimes, sadly, it cannot. If the personalities don’t mesh, or both aren’t willing to put the amount of work in that is needed, all the love in the world won’t fix the unrelenting issues that will be continually faced. Other times in life the timing just isn’t right, so as much as it hurts, it just can’t work out. Sometimes love isn’t even healthy, such as when it’s toxic, not given/taken equally, pushed into a half-crazed stage of addiction, and so on. It is possible to love someone but be forced to leave them if the deep chasm of your two differences becomes too expansive to cross. In circumstances such as these, the hardest thing (but also the necessary next step), is to walk away and start over. That is why sometimes, we just have to let go.
OK, so what is love then?
Love is one of those things that when it is there, you just know it. That intangible, unexplainable connection. When it feels like someone is an extension of yourself and you cannot imagine your life without them. It’s a raw, full-blooded, breath-taking, at times heart-breaking, other times stable yet boring, messy, confusing, and terrifying feeling. Yes, it’s true that the deeper that we allow ourselves to love, the more chance there is for us to get hurt. But it’s always a chance worth taking.
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Cheers until next time,
Crystal
