Married.

Love

[Dani! Don't read this until you've posted yours!!] [Please.]

So, Danica suggested that we each write about what love is, and then post our own and read one another’s.

I feel like this is one of those writing assignments (most likely a test) wherein I will forget the VERY MOST IMPORTANT THING and therefore fail. (Ask me how many times this has happened to me versus how many times I have fantasized it.)

And that’s what love is about: tests you can fail!!!!

Oh. I mean.

Let me start with what I have believed (and no longer believe) about love, at various times in my life:

• Love is doing for other people what you would like them to do for you, in the hopes that they will return your love.
• Love is doing what other people want (or, more likely, what I think they want.)
• Love is making sure the person you love is never mad at you, because you never do anything wrong at all. Ever.
• Love is selflessness, i.e., identitilessness.
• Love is merging with another person, so that you will always always always feel safe.
• Love is being happy.
• Love solves everything, heals all your hurt, and makes it so you will never feel pain again.

I could tell you my path toward a new understanding of love (e-mail me if you want to hear more!) but suffice it to say that it involved a lot of steps. (12.)

Here is what I understand about love, with the caveat that this will ever remain a work in progress. I love that I get to discover this as I go along.

I have a tattoo on my left arm of a heart with the word “love” in it. I completely believe that God is love. (I John 4:8, mangofarmers!!!) I love Love. (Which has already stopped looking like a word to me.)

Love is spiritual. It is the closest word that we can come to express the experience of Higher Power’s care, compassion, grace, kindness, mercy, gentleness, power, and goodness. It is ever available to us all. It is the ground of our being. It is the foundation of all life.

And it is a verb that we get to do interesting embodied things with, like making love, of course, but also like making breakfast and calling the insurance agency and making money to support a family and growing things (if you love to grow things) and snuggling with animals, your beloved, and your children and writing letters and dancing and telling the truth and staying. It is a responsibility and a commitment that we get to keep, to ourselves and to those we love. It is suiting up and showing up, as they say, for whatever is in our lives. And I’m not just talking about arguments or disappointments in our relationships with others; I’m talking about loving myself enough to show up for my rage, for my fear, for my joy, for my discomfort. In fact, the only way I can show up for any of the things that come up in relationship, much less showing up for anyone else, is by loving myself. Loving myself in the way I fantasized someone would love me. Loving myself like a child. Loving myself as best I can and accepting the love of the Goddess the best I can.

When I was younger– and not just when I was a little kid, but through my adulthood, into early recovery– I thought that “romantic” love was the most important, most special kind of love, the kind that would “save me.” I held out the hope that one special person would give me love and make me whole. Instead, I am finding that I am already whole but that I get to explore and grow in a new way through a romantic, committed, loving, intimate relationship with another human being. I don’t think it is “icing on the cake;” I think it is a gift that I am incredibly happy and blessed to have. My love for and with Dani is beautiful and fun and joyous. This morning, I had a moment of lying there in bed with her, thinking, how is this possible? How wonderful is it to be my own self with this other unique self who delights me so! (A: Very very wonderful!)

I love love, the feeling, especially the spontaneous outpouring of emotion that sweeps over me. It is spiritual and physical and fun and poignant and wonderful. And I love the kind of love that doesn’t depend upon that emotional response for its power. And I love that I can have both. I absolutely don’t buy into the story that you can have one (passion) or the other (mature love). I think that intimacy can continue to grow, if you nurture it and work on your own shit.

Love is bigger than what I am writing and bigger than I can understand, and that delights me as well. I love that I will never know, that I can’t contain it, that I get to just be in it, to the best of my ability.

I love you, readers. I love you all.