Truth about love

Love is the sustenance of life. It is what we most desire. Yet, most people I believe, don’t really understand love and it ends up being minimized to sex, a series of transactions, or just an agreement between two people. We pick partners that look good, elevate our status, can support us financially if needed, anything and everything we can think of. We find partners that compliment us but what I’m finding is that very little of us are seeking love for what its intended value is which is for emotional connection and the safety that that offers.

Love offers an intimacy that you can only find when you give yourself up to it. When you focus on the person you love and think “I can’t imagine my life without them." A life that despite any potential differences, arguments or disagreements connects you to another human being so completely and yet fosters growth and autonomy. Love is the answer to most of the worlds unhappiness. It is love that can lead us through the darkest of times. The love I speak of though can not be found without the most critical component, safety.

What happens when love is lost? When our connection to our partner is severed? We lose our ever living minds. We begin fighting, we are in complete distress. We begin to question if we can depend on our partner? We wonder if we matter, if they will show up when we need them? All the fighting, the demands, at times the out right nastiness is our cries for our partner. It’s a plea to get our partner back emotionally and to work on building back a sense of safety in the connection. When we have a desperate need for an emotional response from our partner and they don’t hear us it ends in blaming, a fear of rejection, and loss. The more fear and loss we feel the more detached we become from one another. That detachment can be the end of something really great or really bad I suppose, depending on how you look at it.

Being emotionally responsive to our partner is at the very foundation of loving them well and being able to receive love from them in return. Emotional responsiveness helps ease our fears and lets us know we are there for one another. That when the going gets tough we will be there for one another no matter what.

I have spent the last month reading feverishly. I've been searching for answers about love, attachments, emotional abuse, loss and grief. I have spent countless days searching the words and research of others to try to better understand myself, to show up for my kids differently, to better understand her. I need to understand what and who I am. How were we wired to love? Is that even a thing that gets considered? All the research suggest that it does. I have learned a great deal about myself. I have torn myself apart a thousand times just to rebuild myself a little differently each time. I don't know that the healing journey gets any easier but what I do know is that I am committed to finding the answers I seek.

I could not hear the hurt. All I saw was the anger during the most difficult of times. It was the evidence supporting that I had fucked it up again, that I was a failure. So rather than address that, I wanted to smooth it over, make it better in that moment, I knew that I was losing her, that it wasn't because I didn't care for her or need her, it was that I could not deal with the fear of losing her. That fear led me to not listen which led to my inability to connect to her which made her feel unsafe, unsure that I had her back, and I didn't because I led from my ego, not from my heart.

What is love then? It is the willingness to take more risks and constantly reach for intimacy and feeling safe with your partner. When you feel safe, love and the closeness it produces comes naturally. You have the ability to show up and connect to your partner, to be warm. The moment you stop feeling safe you lose the ability to attune with them, to foster the playful and loving side and ultimately, the deterioration of the relationship continues. The distrust grows and they no longer believe you will be there when they need you most. And either you will listen or you will not but take it from someone who has lived in the aftermath of not listening, the results of being unwilling to listen to our partner is a cost far too great to pay. We may not always know how to tell our partners how important they are to us, how much we want to be with them, but giving them access to our vulnerabilities regardless of the outcome gives us a fighting chance at earning even a little bit of trust back each time. Show up empty and you will walk away holding your ego in your hands, nothing more nothing less.