Last week’s piece on ‘holding space’ started off by talking about love and about how much weight we overburden the word with, while at the same time how little thought we give to what we actually mean by it. Perhaps there is a problem in that we all have our own perception of what the word means, and a bigger problem if we mean one thing when we say it and expect it to mean something else when we hear it. That got me thinking.
These are just a few random thoughts on my take on the huge little word ‘love’…
They say that until you love yourself you cannot love anyone else. I believe that it is also true that until you can love yourself, you will struggle to allow anyone else to love you.
We should not confuse self-love with self-esteem or self-confidence. Self-confidence can be created by ego. Self-esteem isn’t something we have, it is something we do: respect yourself, affirm your strengths, celebrate your successes, don’t just accept the compliments, collect them, store them up for when you need them. Self-love flows from self-esteem, coupled with honest self-awareness and self-reflection. We are often all-too-aware of our shortcomings, but the solution isn’t to pretend that they do not exist.
Love is NOT blind. Love sees very clearly.
We do not love someone because we think they are perfect. We might fall in love with that idealised perception but in love is not loving; it is infatuation, fantasy, an illusion.
We do not love someone in spite of their flaws or shortcomings (as we perceive some of their traits to be) – we do not love 80% of the person and accept the other 20% as being the price to be paid. That is not loving.
We love someone, truly love them, when we love the whole of who they are, both the things we like and the things we don’t, the things we approve and relish and the things that make us flinch or cringe. We love them in their wholeness for knowing that to remove even a fraction of 1% of who they are, would be to make them someone else.
To love someone is to be endlessly curious about them. It is to want them to be happy and fulfilled. It is to want to learn from them and to teach them in fair exchange (which is not necessarily the same as in equal measure).
It is to want to debate and discuss and dispute. And to want to sit in silence.
To love someone is the ability to share a moment in connected separation, which can be as magical as one person working through the tai chi form while another simply stands and watches a sea-sky change colour – or as mundane as someone watching football on the television while another reads – or as mundanely magical a parent watching their baby sleep.
When we begin to understand what it means to love someone, we start to see how to love our self. We start to see the whole shape of our past relationships, the loves that came and went. And we allow ourselves to mourn the unlived life, which we must do before we can step into the life that is awaiting us. Past relationships will haunt us, if we do not grieve for the loss of them – grieve for what they didn’t become, or what they did become and is now gone. Even if we know that we are better off without them, mourn for their passing. Grieve even more for the good that they were that could not be carried forward. Only when we have mourned the loss can we truly let it rest.
Letting it rest does not mean pretending it didn’t happen, rather acknowledging that it did and more than that, that it is now part of who we are. We need to embed those experiences into our wholeness, like them or not, and to love the self that incorporates them – not despite them, not because of them – just the wholeness that happens to include them. This is the practice of self-love…and sometimes it does take practice. But I do believe that only when we can do it with our self, can we do it with others and allow them to do it with us.
To love truly and to be truly loved is not to live happily ever after. It is to know that the unhappy parts of the ever after are worth working through or waiting out. It is to know that when you’re on the outer rim of that infinity symbol, that reclining figure of eight, the centre is still holding and the flow will bring you back to centre. Not once, but many times.
Love is not a once-and-forever-thing. It is an ebbing and flowing tide, a sea of shifting shades, depth and shallows, storms and currents and calms. We can capture sea water in a bottle and pour into a bowl, but it is no longer the sea. We can tie this thing ‘love’ up in knots of promises and burden it with expectation, but we experience it only when we let it be.
