The Labor of Love

I have always second-guessed those who say that love is easy. Or rather that love should be easy with the right person. Any person that I hear say that or something similar always has this glassy look in their eyes like they are on some drug that I haven’t managed to try yet. I feel cynical and then have an immediate fear of missing out that I can never quite shake when I meet those types of people. The placidness in their expressions never ceases to amaze me but has always left me curious. They say comparison is the thief of joy but in contrast to the madness behind my eyes, the boredom is likely comforting to them.

I want to bombard them with questions, but the ones at the forefront of my mind are: how do you handle conflict or adversity and still manage to never become jaded? How are you able to make your love appear so easy? Is it an act? Do you ever fucking fight?

To me, since I have never dared to ask, the longing and devotion in those dazed stares always just comes off as disingenuous and disillusioned, because who doesn’t ever fight… but I digress, I guess that is the Scorpio sass in me.

In my experience, love has always been laborious. There has yet to be a man or woman, friend or lover, family or stranger that I have felt love towards, that has not ended or existed in tandem with extreme difficulty at one point or another. To me and those I confide in, this is a personal problem. Yet I can barely fathom how this isn’t a universal experience in some way.

To be human is to have conflict, it is inherent to our nature and who we are as beings. Without that yin and yang of peace and security balanced with chaos and trauma, there is nothing to compare our experiences to. As growing children, we draw this comparison and then utilize it to flourish and learn. We soak up all of the relationships and interactions around us to develop into who we are as adults, experiences in youth are formative as we know. The first love we tend to have is that of our families, but when that first foray into love isn’t safe or has more conflict than it does security, love can morph to become a poison that feeds into how we love ourselves and everyone around us.

I knew and know love. Do not get me wrong. I have been privileged in this life to love and to be loved in return. But as I mentioned before, love to me has always been transient, never persistent, and as fickle as a weather report from week to week.

But in my heart I wonder is this not the nature of love? Does it need to ebb and flow like the tides to stay consistent over time?

I draw on life experiences to grapple with these questions and seem to rarely find answers. Yet through that introspection, there are a few things that I know:

I know that my mother taught me that to love was to be selfless and meant to put others before yourself. She told me once that the act of becoming a mother showed her the true meaning of love, in that it is painful but worth it in the end. She put her body second when it came to birthing me and she continued to put herself second as the years went by. She had to in many ways when our father died and she became the sole parent in the household, but she was doing it well before that. That selflessness taught me to be selfless as well, that as a woman this is something I should expect from love, but a mother’s love cannot be compared to that of a first love or a tenth love, it really cannot be quantified, only mimicked. That mimicry got me to places in hindsight I wish I never went, but that formed me into developing the knowledge that putting others before yourself doesn’t develop love, it hinders it. It causes reliance and it causes a lack of self so profound I am still relearning who I am 20 years later.

In church I was taught that the love of God had to be earned through actions and love was only given if you acted a certain way, otherwise punishments were justifiable. I have since learned that teaching is entirely false and have stopped practicing religion because of it. True love is not contingent on being perfect or form-fitting a set of laid-out rules. That is control.

I have learned through my friendships that love can be fake and can be used as a trojan horse to get inside you only to take what is wanted and then to be discarded later. This has led me to have a small circle that over time has dwindled and rarely replenishes due to past wounds.

I have found through age and the wisdom of others that the anchor that keeps love consistent is self-love. It is the structural link in the chain that is all of our past and future relationships. Without self-love, the clarity in fully loving partnerships that everyone is searching for is completely unattainable. Believe me when I say that I have tried.

Love unravels all around us when we cannot find love within the foundations of ourselves. But this to me is also a Catch-22. If you do not already have the love of yourself in some way, shape, or form from an early age, how are you able to learn that or see that love intuitively in others? What can cause that shift from being judgemental to accepting?

These are the questions I grapple with in my loving relationships. I am a chronic people pleaser because of it and feel isolated and alone even when I am surrounded by those who say they love me. I have a hard time believing it because of the emptiness I have within myself and that insecurity rubs off on those closest to me and in turn causes resentment and frustration. Who really wants to love someone who does not feel worthy of the love they give themselves, let alone the love of someone else?

My friends who used to be in this gulf of sadness but have since gotten healthy claim there is a shift in your consciousness once you start to get better- where you begin to believe in love because you see it within yourself and therefore everywhere around you-seeing the world through rose-colored glasses if you will. It isn’t a person, place, or thing that causes that shift necessarily but all of these things can help with the mental shift necessary for this change. Some people have it naturally, others require copious amounts of medication to achieve it, but the end goal is the same regardless of how it is achieved.

All I can hope for myself is that I can start to see the good more frequently, and hope that I am not a lost cause. By slowly treating myself with kindness, grace, and civility those actions will rub off on my interactions with others. Eventually. It all takes time.

For now, I watch the love around me kindle and extinguish, grow, and then ebb. And while I will never know the inner workings of those couples who thrive and exude confidence in themselves as a unit and separately, until I can reach some type of inner peace, that high they are touting will never be mine.