Married.

What is love?

It’s funny that I’m the one who suggested we both write about this and I’m the one who hasn’t done it yet. I haven’t read Annie’s either because we are sposed to write them before we read what the other has written!

I had three thoughts about it. Let’s see if I can remember all three of them!

1. Love is joy. i figured this out not that long ago.

See, there was some kind of car insurance commercial a while back where some therapist (this was a fundamentally stupid premise btw) talked about how there were four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and scared. Her point, evidently, was that other insurance companies make her really MAD (weak segue, lady) but it was a super-useful commercial up to that point! ‘Cause it makes it very easy to be like “which of these am I feeling?” in early recovery (on account of how most people in early recovery don’t know WHAT they are feeling most of the time).

And later on it made it very easy to explore how things like guilt and shame and embarrassment are all just different flavors of FEAR. I like to play the game of “If there are only four basic feelings, which one is this?” Sometimes things are a combination, like I think excitement is happiness mixed with a certain amount of fear about (for example) change.

So I was thinking about what love is. One of those emotions? A whole other emotion? An action? A cake flavor? A color? A ring size? And it occured to me that it must be joy, if it’s one of those. That seemed to make sense. We say we love things when they bring us joy, right?

I love this dress! It brings me joy! I love playing pinball! It brings me joy! I love chocolate! It brings me joy! I love Annie! Being with her brings me joy!

I very much like the idea that love=joy and joy=love. To me, it explains a lot about why people are always chasing romantic love; we so often get confused and think that it is the only way we can have joy. Think that it means being chosen and therefore being accepted and therefore being worthy and therefore being loved, finally, when in fact we are all those things totally fine on our owns.

2. Being in love is hugely different from what I thought it meant ten years ago. Back then, I thought that liking someone meant being in love. Or having a crush. YOU know – like in all those stories where people fall in love immediately. Or they’re “in love” with someone pretty that they never even met, and follow them around like one obsessed until True Love Wins Out. Because if you like someone, then OBVIOUSLY they are going to like you back, and EVEN MORE OBVIOUSLY they are the One Right Person and you will be Together Forever.

It was so easy to confuse that “high” of the crush with actual love. That is what all those movies and cartoons and chick lit novels and everything else tells us, right? You see someone, your pupils turn into heart shapes and fly out of your skull, IT IS LOVE. THAT IS ALL. And the only satisfactory ending to the store is that the heart-eyeball person and the eyeballee will be together forever. Goofy.

It dawned on me some months ago that, I think, being in love means being IN love. Some people say love is a verb, which is a totally fine and awesome thing to say – love as an act rather than a feeling. (Although a quick googling didn’t turn up one sane thing that anyone had written on the subject.) Ok: love requires that our behavior be loving, compassionate, understanding. If it’s not, then we can’t very well claim to be friends, parents, teachers, partners, or any of those other relationships that are supposed to involve some kind of love. But being IN love has to be different, or why do people get married?

It makes me think of the ocean. Being IN the ocean. Being in a loving intimate dating relationship is like that… there might be waves and tides (also the occasional jellyfish), but the love that we have for one another, the love we experience, the way that we behave with love and experience loving behavior, the depth of emotional intimacy, the complex tangle and weave of our lives together, informs and suffuses every moment of our individual beings, increasingly as the relationship grows.

I guess that being IN love has to involve loving ourselves that deeply too, accepting and believing and understanding and treating ourselves with tremendous love, because you can’t love someone else more than you can love yourself. So relationships tend to die off when they pass the point of our own love for ourselves. We escape, flee, cast them aside somehow. Or suffer at a drab baseline for many years out of fear, first.

(It’s like when people say they wouldn’t trust someone any farther than they could throw them – but different. You can’t love someone any farther than you can throw yourself! No, wait – that’s not quite it.)

3. Annie started making me breakfast before I got up, ages ago. I think I finally asked her why she kept doing that. Marveling at it. And she said the most ridiculous thing. She told me that she wanted to make me breakfast (in bed mind you) EVERY DAY SHE COULD FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES.

Now that’s love.