Why Are We So Afraid of Love?
It’s An Inside Job
Aromantic, polyamorous, monogamous as a prairie vole. Jealous. Insecure. Generous. Secure. Platonic. Crushes. Besties. Soul mates.
So many kinds of love. We say love is love. And love wins.
But I love, profoundly, and it doesn’t feel like winning. (I’m not talking about my spouse. She is separate from these reflections, with access to a sacred place — the meadow beyond right and wrong, and all that.)
But I love.
And my gift is seeing. I see wholeness in you, that you may not yet know. I accept — that you are you. All of you, is you.
And I love.
I don’t need you to be different for me, because you are not me. I don’t need your flaws to be obscured, favoring the parts deemed ‘good.’ I see you how you are. In your fullest, tallest, and deepest. I see how the sun touches your face and the shadow it casts onto the earth behind you. Beneath your feet.
I see you in your mistakes. Your celebrations. Your judgments. Your exclusions. Your best efforts. Your biggest misses. Your most intimate, frightening moments of overwhelm — control lost. Red faced. Frightened by your own limitations.
Ashamed, angry, weeping, or letting out one of those laughs everyone who knows you delights in. In fact, I see how sometimes when you laugh too exuberantly, you hit your head on the wall behind you and have that moment of … surprise, remembering that you have a body. And we laugh harder.
The times you think you know me and what I expect, but I am certain you are talking about another person, entirely, and I realize I am a caricature of someone you knew — maybe even you. And it stings, but I don’t correct you unless it is important.
And usually, it’s not.
So I just … clarify. I ask for consent, to clarify. Communicate. Because we misunderstand things here. And I choose to understand. “It’s more like this … for me. How is it for you?”
The way you think the things you do are weird. (Really weird.) We all have really weird things. Skeletons and such. Ghosts. Closets, et al.
Hiding. Running. Evading interaction from a place of insecurity / uncertainty / fear and too many days with too many things that have gone wrong. Misunderstood.
And the times they have gone … too right. And that is a whole, other problem.
The way you wear yourself on the bones beneath your skin. The way you try to do it just right, not too much, not too little. Inspired and doubting.
When you forget to be too serious. Too guarded. Mask slips. Just for a second. What was that? Who was that?
The weariness that stands taller each passing year. After year. Hairs turning grey.
I see the ways we categorize love. Shuffle, contort, sexualize, misunderstand, and fence in, or lock out, love. Stuck in our pride. We place the rules of a crumbling, but sticky patriarchy, all over love.
Follow narrow lines,
painted in gender,
over the top of love.
We are cheap with our love. We do not believe there is enough to go around, and we cannot share. We cannot ‘love’ many or say we ‘love’ without it meaning something more. If we give in, to love, what will happen? It’s scary, right?
Possessive of love. What if they love that other person more? What if I lose my love? And so on. We’ve been taught that love doesn’t last. It doesn’t endure. It’s fragile. Elusive. And sometimes, that it hurts. (but was that love?)
So we brace against it and we turn away from it and we like, not love, and we think—with them I just can’t.
But it’s ok. Love is just a warm feeling we too often pull away from. It’s connection, belonging, appreciation. A soft spot, a deeper breath, a safer place. Boundaries. Stability. You know?
I have loved. And I have felt that sparkle, when affinities and seeing and being seen match up in the hustle of our everyday. Those gifts, a break in the monotony. Bright little moments and the limerance that follows because it is so, so painful here. And I have seen that door shut. That friendship end. Mentors fall. Ghosting sucks. That ache, that bruise, that confusion. Rejection hurts.
Love is love. And love wins. And it is too close to what we fear. Warm is too hot to touch. And hot is too much to risk losing. And we can only expect to be treated how we have already been treated, and when that has been messy…
Or we have been messy.
It’s complicated.
What keeps you from giving or receiving love? Where do you get stuck? What is unhealed, unresolved, still bottled up? What lessons have you learned about love?
As a professional lantern of unconditional, unflinching love, I’ve learned that not everyone is open for that kind of acceptance. It’s scary. It’s an inside job, and people can only accept as much love as they have cultivated space for inside of themselves.
I have learned that nobody owes me anything at all. And I can love someone and accept that there is no place outside of me for that love to land.
I have learned it takes time, and for some, a lifetime to cultivate that space. That is not my work. It is theirs.
My work is to love me, no matter what. Understand my own boundaries. Communicate. And live as well as I can, for as long as I get to — without internalizing the personal growth and needs of others or the limitations of our culture.
