Observations on Love

The topic of love has been a slight obsession of mine for around 7 or 8 years, now. I guess having my heart broken in a brutal, pointless manner made me really question the details of love and its effects on people: why do people react in different ways to love, what makes someone fall in love, how do I deal with a broken heart or unrequited love, why do we fall in love in the first place, what are our boundaries in love.

For a while, I tried to put love in boxes marked in my mind as ‘friends’ or ‘family’ or ‘romantic inclination’. It was easier that way—clear-cut boundaries that came with their own set of rules that I simply had to follow, and life would be easy. After a while, though, it just wasn’t enough for me…especially after reading The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz, who explains that all the love we feel is coming from within not without. So, if all my love is coming from one source, why am I trying to cram a weird three-pronged spigot onto it and then expect each flow to come out different colors?

So, over the years, I’ve let my mind rest on the fact that love is a flow, not a permanent installation. Some days, that flow is plentiful and I turn into this gushy, cheesy mess of a fool in love with everything. Other days, like high-anxiety or -depression days, it takes all my energy just to get a few drips from it to take care of myself and those closest to me. Even though I’m not a fan of the few drip days, I try to stay patient with myself and remember the days when it felt like the love would never end.

Once I had established that concept for myself, however, I needed to understand who to love and how to love them. Maybe I’ve become too jaded, having ripped the wool of naivety off my eyes unceremoniously after having grown up with a dream-like mentality toward life (deluded, we’ll actually call it deluded). I had a lot of trust for a lot of people; and, because of that blind trust, I came out of a lot of relationships—both romantic and platonic—with many emotional scrapes and bruises. I quickly learned that trust is something that is earned, not freely given. And even though I know my capacity to love is infinite, my capacity for bullshit is definitely finite. There’s a difference between loving someone despite their flaws and letting your love blind you to a person’s abuse.

At the same time, there’s that kind of love that involves loving from a distance in order to let someone grow without hurting yourself during their growth. There’s also the love that’s felt when looking into the eyes of a stranger or acquaintance and recognizing their soul as loving and pure despite any outward flaws. And there’s the love and admiration felt when experiencing art in its many facets. Love is everywhere, in everyone and everything…but who to love and how to love them?

My answer to the ‘who to love’ question is everyone, by varying degrees. But how to love them? This is where the walls start closing in on me. It’s like I never learned how to properly love, and now I’m like a toddler taking my first shaky steps in a world new to me...only it’s taking me years to learn how to walk, and I’m still not quite sure what I’m doing. How much is too much? How much is not enough? Am I annoying them, or do they think I hate them? Where is the balance?

I know how I’d like to love; but we live in a strange society where taboos are set in weird places: hugs have a 50% chance of being awkward, kissing is reserved for romance and mothers, even a touch on an arm can communicate platonic affection incorrectly. How on earth did we get so uptight about physical touch and nudity, where it’s assumed that either will lead to sex or anything along those lines? And then there’s emotional vulnerability. By writing all of this, I may be communicating to some that I’m desperate for affection or sex. But, to others, I could be coming off as whiny or over-analyzing (ok, you got me there; I am the queen of over-analyzing). I’m not sure if even one reader will consume this thought piece with the same curiosity and fascination with which I’m writing it. This aspect of humanity—the eye-of-the-beholder aspect—is something that both frustrates and intrigues me on a regular basis. All vulnerability is unique to the individual and their biases, which makes love a minefield for those who want to love openly in their own way without getting hit on or judged harshly.

Another unanswered love question I have: when did we decide that monogamy is the best route for love? Once I realized that my capacity to love is infinite, I began to question this, especially after seeing so many failed marriages and relationships based on love fading or cheating or general, consistent frustration with one another. Through my own love life, I’ve found that I don’t regret many of those I’ve loved; but those loves faded. It doesn’t mean they never existed, they just had their time and place. I feel like that’s love: a lesson in warmth, empathy, and vulnerability that has its own time and place. Those people haven’t left my heart or my mind, but they also don’t get in the way of my current relationship because here and now has its own lesson to teach, one I’m happy to be learning and growing through.

Honestly, I believe monogamy is a man-made (as opposed to natural) construct built to promote love-opposing emotional stumbling blocks like possessiveness/jealousy and shame/guilt. Love isn’t possessive or jealous, neither does love create feelings of guilt or shame. Those are all societal blocks, or taboos, telling us we aren’t allowed to be romantically inclined toward more than one person at once. That’s greedy, right? But why is it greedy? If you’re being safe, compassionate, and respectfully communicative with all your partners, what’s so awful about it? What’s holding us back from realizing our full potential in love? And why are we suddenly unfaithful or disloyal for falling in love with more than one person? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I have more than one friend. Am I an unfaithful or disloyal friend, then? So why do we put that barrier up around romantic relationships? It just seems silly to me.

My opinions of love are ever-changing, ever-flowing; however, these are some things I have made up my mind as fact—through logic—while I continue to seek clarity on topics that still seem muddy to me. Love will continue to fascinate me because it’s so hard to truly understand. It’s a force of nature that can, at once, feel exhilarating and inspiring; and then it can turn around and feel like death and dying. It’s an emotion with physical consequences, both positive and negative. It’s both mystery and fact—unignorable and unimaginable, all at once. I will always love love…and I will always kind of hate love, too.