There is this idea that love is something elusive and grandiose, that it's only really real when it is big and intense and life threateningly permanent. Like when you would catch a grenade for someone, even though they wouldn't do the same for you. Well that's just stupid! Quite frankly, Bruno Mars, if someone is trying to kill me via grenade they're probably not going to stop because some fool got in the way and blew themselves up. No, if I've gotten myself into a grenade throwing situation I'd much rather my loved ones not get themselves killed delaying my assassination. I'd really rather they let me clean up my own mess, thanks.
Love is such a wonderful and complex emotion. Love can mean all sorts of things, can exist in all sorts of ways. But for some reason we seem really set on minimizing it, narrowing it down and restricting it. Why are we so scared of it?
I've been thinking a lot about relationships and love and how I want to live my life since my last blog post. I've been doing a lot of reflecting about how and with who and why I fall for people, what value I place on what types of relationships, and what different sorts of dynamics this produces in my life. That reflecting is still very much a work in progress. By no means do I actually have anything figured out.
What I have noticed, though, is that since I have made the active choice to stop buying into traditional relationship structures, I've had a lot more love in my life. Since I'm not restricted to giving all my emotional energy to one person, I've found that I have more energy to give everyone. And since I am not placing demands on a particular person to reciprocate my feelings/energy, I've got more emotional resources to draw upon and am less invested in trying to balance out emotional exchanges.
I feel like in traditional relationship structures emotions sometimes get treated like goods that can be bartered for. Like, "you gave me 5 apples but 2 of them were rotten, so I'm only going to give you 3 oranges." Now if someone gives me 5 apples I will appreciate them and give back to them how ever many oranges I can manage to give them. It might be 1, it might be 7. Maybe I'll give them something that's not even a fruit instead! The point is, instead of trying to exchange like for like with people, I give what I am able to give and take what they are able to give. If I want it, and vice versa.
There is less attachment to the love in my life now, though that is definitely still a work in progress! What I mean is, when I start to feel loving feelings for someone, I don't feel the need to clamp down on that person and make them be a part of my life in a particular way so much anymore. I'm getting better at just sitting with those feelings and letting them be there and letting the relationship be whatever form it will be. Again, it's something that I'm working on, not something that I have mastered.
It can be tricky because while I think about relationships and emotions as unstructured things, I quite often find myself in various types of relationships and having various types of emotions with people who take a more structured approach to things. To them, certain feelings or behaviours or whatever mean certain things, whereas to me, well, I've just summed it up in a new tattoo...
Loving someone doesn't have to mean anything more than that you care about them. Whether or not they reciprocate doesn't validate or invalidate your feelings. It's worth checking in with yourself to make sure that you're not investing too much energy on something that is not giving you anything back, you know, for self care and all that. And it's worth remembering that love is just an emotion. It doesn't have to be that big of a deal.
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