(Baby don’t hurt me)
While this thought has been a very, very long time coming the post has not. I actually never intended to really write it down but, then my Doctor said maybe I should.
There are going to be three parts of this exploration, the first is a metaphor that I made up on the fly, the second is specifically what love is NOT, and the third is what little I do know about the topic. It is also going to be the first published piece of a larger body of work regarding masculinity.
Love is the Dragon:
(Or, Why drinking and extemporaneous speaking don’t mix.)
This fragment is all that’s left in my memory of a speech I gave impromptu at a wedding once. I don’t fully remember what I said to be clear, but I know what I wanted to begin with because this was around when I was starting to become a bit more confident in the subject.
I don’t know a lot, but what I do know, I learned by making mistakes. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, and most of them were with people who deserved much better than to come across my self.
When I was a child, I used to think that love was the fair maiden, the prize to be won by completing the quest. That I would see the fair maiden and know, boom, this, this I love.
When I was a bit older, I thought, love is the brave knight, who would boldly go out and defeat his enemies without fear. Riding back, triumphant and ready to accept love.
At some point I thought, maybe love was magic that occurred between the two, a spell cast, and unbreakable sorcery that would lead to happily ever after.
This is not what love is, I now know that Love is the Dragon.
Love it the battle, the fight. It’s the will that everyday, you will face the difficult things, regardless of the cost, to make things work.
Love isn’t easy, it’s not magic, it’s not a person and it isn’t fate. It is a decision to continue on a course and to make that thing happen no matter what. It can burn you; it might eat you and leave you without purpose, but love is the challenge that can never be fulfilled. That, is what love is.
What love Isn’t.
(And other lessons from my youth)
An Erection: OK boys, here’s an easy lesson, and you are probably at least peripherally aware of it. You need to make a concerted effort not to let your penis think for you. It is going to want to do a lot of the cognitive heavy lifting when it comes to interactions with women from the time, you’re 15 to about 30 and, for some guys it never goes away. The average dude knows the difference between an erection and love, but still doesn’t think about consequences. I’m not going to go much farther down this path but, wanting to get laid because of biological imperative, an erection, is not love. No further notes.
It’s also not Magic, in case you think such things exists. Don’t laugh, I did. I believed in soul mates and all that Disney baggage. Feel free to laugh at me if you want, I probably deserve it for being so gullible. So, to reiterate, it’s not magic, there are no soul mates. I’m not saying don’t get out there and meet people, but you will probably find your actions regrettable if you get stuck in the loop of thinking one single special person out there is the right person for you. I certainly feel those regrets. There is something to be said for compatibility, but, no sorcery. Love is not magic.
Limerence: Now we get into something that is a tricky little bugger. This one was my bugaboo and unfortunately one that cause my self and others unnecessary emotional pain. Limerence is the feeling of loving someone you get when you first meet someone and fall for them. The infatuation, wanting to be with them, the obsessing over them. It FEELS like love, and its no doubt biologically wired to make you think that. I wish I didn’t feel limerence the way I did earlier in my life. Because there was a time that all I did was fall in love. The problem was I had so many mental issues that a relationship was well neigh impossible for me to properly engage in. The trickiness to limerence is that you do need it, you do actually need to fall for someone in the beginning of a relationship to start the relationship. You just can’t expect it to stick around and to feel that exact way about someone the whole time. Limerence is not Love, it just feels exactly like it and while it is the perfect depiction of love in every movie you ever watch it will in fact be limerence. So, one last time, and say it with me, limerence is not love.
Care-taking is the final piece here because it can be a bit of a crutch. We are humans and humans care for each other. There’s a trick con-men use to win you over, they ask you to do a favor for them. Something really, really easy that you will have a hard time saying no to. The trick is that, while you are the one doing the favor, in the long term it makes you trust them more. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care for people, I’m actually writing an entire ideology of healthy masculinity around the idea of compassion. I’m saying that you have to be mindful that helping people will make you like them. There exists within this emotional response a feedback loop that can turn you into a care taker who has little more in common or little more to build upon than simply taking care of someone. You will absolutely take care of those you love, but if you are a strong person, you will take care of many others too. Simple care taking, is not love.
So… What is Love?
(Don’t hurt me, no more)
Well, it can be all of the above for starters, which is why it’s so hard to figure out when you’re a kid. You almost certainly will be sexually attracted to someone you fall for and you will do whatever you can to take care of them. Not only that but, let’s face it, falling for someone feels like magic. It really does so, it’s hard not to listen to the songs and think about faery tales.
At the end of the day though, those are there to help lead you to what love actually is; The Dragon.
Because it’s not happily ever after. You will not get along with the person you love every day, you will not want to do everything they do. You will not want to spend every waking moment with them. Your ego will pick fights with them. You, will pick fights with them. The garbage behavior your father, your grand fathers had, will become your garbage behavior. Every stress that enters your life will find a venting point upon this person that you have so close to you.
How you learn to get along with them, how you learn to put your ego aside. The way you take steps to learn the behaviors that hurt them and them stop making those actions. The way you learn to speak to each other, to communicate your emotions without being hurtful.
That is what love is. Love is the way you become responsible for who you are so that you can be with someone else.
It’s about understanding that they may not always feel the same way about you, it’s about understanding that you have an impact on their emotions, but that you are only responsible for your own emotions and your own actions. Then taking ownership of those actions that hurt them. It’s about actually listening to them, and it’s also about understanding them. It’s about understanding that you may not know your own emotions, and they may not know theirs. They may not know what they are feeling, it can be very hard to describe emotions for both men and women. Yet it’s about still being there for them and listening to them in that moment
In this last part is a warning too, loving someone who does not take responsibility of themselves and their actions will inevitably lead to a toxic relationship. If you have given them every fair chance, you must leave that place, leave them, and grieve them.
Love goes both ways, it must, it has to. You should strive to give more than you get, but they should too, both parties must be willing to sacrifice more than have. Failure to observe this can lead to resentment and that, simply put will be the death of any relationship.
That is love. It’s the internal turmoil and strength and the forgiveness needed to move on so that you can face it again. Life isn’t easy, life isn’t fair, but if you do find love it does make life much better because life is just much more beautiful when you can share it.