What Happened to Love?

I feel like I missed my window.  Like there was a time that I could have found love but I was either too sick, too new in recovery, too traumatized, too something to let it in. And having a picker that picks avoidant, narcissists, the only thing I really ever found was love bombing and fictitious love that was really just an on ramp to emotional abuse.  

Kinda sad when I review my dating history...I don’t know how anyone who has tried so fucking hard has gotten it so fucking wrong repeatedly...

And yet, I have.

I can see now that I didn’t love me for a very long time and that allowed me to partner up with men that also didn’t love me. It was all a con.  I pretended to be weller than I was and then pretended they were going to care about me and show up for me.  My own sickness and codependency causing the union to begin, and their behavior and lack of concern, the thing that caused me to end it. After a lot of hand wringing and soul sickness.

There has only been one time in my life where I was healthy enough to just adore and be adored. And I think this is what is lacking in our society today.  The ability to be truly bowled over by another person. To notice and be moved by the curve of their face, the outline of their shoulders in a crowd, to have this most intimate connection with this person who you trust and believe and love in a way and manner that sometimes takes your breath away.  I mean, I think people still feel this about their beloved, but I feel like we as a society have bled out that kind of vulnerability.  If we offer it up, we are terrified we will be perceived as weak or needy.  And being loved like that is not easy either, I myself always find myself doubting the authenticity of it all.  Is this guy for real or just another covert narcissist with a great cover?  And in my case, it is usually the later...

But one time it was just boy meets girl and we just fell in love.  Completely,  totally, adoringly in love.  The way he felt, the vulnerability we shared.  I swear to God I have never felt as safe as I did in his arms.  Never.  Not before, not since.  I adored him.  He adored me.  We held each other in unconditional positive regard...always. Still do really.  I still think the world of him and he me.  It didn’t work out for good reason, but that doesn’t change that the love we shared has persisted and changed over time.  I want good things for him, always.  I still love his kids.  I still wish him well. Even though he broke my heart into fragments, I still think well of him and the love we shared.

I have to own that I never really felt that way with another man.  Ever.  There is always some weird competitive paradigm occurring that I absolutely participate in.  I don’t adore, I tolerate.  I wish he were different.  I often find myself trying to find an exit. Or perhaps an appropriate time for exit.  For the most part, I have dated men that I could see the ending at the beginning which is what made it safe to engage in the first place.  Not a lot of risk there when you knew the fiery crash was inevitable.

I have spent a lot of time alone thinking, reading, writing, healing.  And it has been time well spent.  And the result of all this time is that I feel bereft for love’s place in this world.  Everything feels so self aggrandizing and self centered where love is concerned.  I know we can’t rely on the reality of social media as being the harbinger of what love really looks like behind the scenes.  Being a divorce lawyer for all these years, has given me way too much information about what lies beneath the shiny veneer of love’s facade.  Horror stories, most often. Ugly, twisted, brutality masquerading as love and commitment and fidelity and trust.  When most relationships I see have none of it.  None!

I still believe in and want the old day love stories.  The one where you are walking down a street and you look into a window and you see a person waiting on a table, or buying a newspaper, or getting soaked in the rain and something in you pops off and says unequivocally, “I need to get to know this person!”  Perhaps not love at first sight, but interest, curiosity, vulnerability.  It takes a great deal of strength to walk up to a total stranger and engage with your heart in your hand.  “Hi, I don’t know you, but I think I would really like to...” Then allowing the space and grace for two veritable strangers to take the time to really get to know each other.  Not jump into bed.  Not give up their lives and subsume themselves in the lofty loving hormones, but really hold their center and allow this other person into their interiority...vulnerable, raw, honesty, authentic.  Stripping away pretext and “rules” and just going for the most honest thing two people attracted to each other can do or say, “I see you, and I want to know more, today and tomorrow, and perhaps, just maybe forever...”

I don’t know what love looks like today.  I don’t see the love I want anyway.  Or maybe I do but I am too picky, too idealistic, too jaded.  Perhaps I have sat too close a love’s demise for all these years to have any faith at all anymore.  Perhaps I have attempted too many love stories of my own that have been complete disasters, that I can’t shake the history from any new encounter.

I believe interest is immediate.  But love is slow.  It takes time, it evolves, it changes you.  It is making a decision to turn towards the same person together day after mother fucking day.  It is hard to love and yet, it is the most worthwhile endeavor we make as humans.  Love is the elixir of life. It is what keeps us all going in good times and in bad.  Love is the thing that saves us, mostly from ourselves.

The whole world feels like a crisis now.  And love isn’t immune.  What I see, what I experience, feels like love has been forsaken by all.  I mean, I think a lot of us are out there still trying but we seem to forget that love shall always require sacrifice, honor, truth, authenticity, fidelity, adoration, attention, dedication, commitment, faith, hope, lust, an unwavering commitment to be honest about the things we most want to lie about. And without all of the above, we can’t have love.  Love is kind and patient but she is also quite demanding.  You can have something else if you don’t have all of the above, but it isn’t love...

It appears to me that we have all become so afraid of limiting our options we are missing out on the roller coaster ride that love promises.  Is there really anything more intimate than adoring another?  Really?  What?  I can’t think of anything.  Placing your attention and interest in another, investing in them in a loving, caring, dedicated way is perhaps the best use of life and living.  And yet, we tend to hold our cards for so long that the game is over and there we sit with a whole hand of great fucking cards that shall never be played.

I do my best to hold the belief that love shall prevail but I have to admit that with each passing day, I find myself further from belief and perhaps less capable than I was the day before.  Singledom has its own rewards...and yes, they shall never be so vast, expansive and all encompassing as love promises, but it has safety and calm and security and those things are, at least for me, enough far too often.

What happened to love?  We did.  Our big brains have usurped love’s landscape and purview and now we have situationships, endless dating that leads nowhere and complete disinterest in humanity as the process to secure a connection with another human being is arduous and futile.  The more distant we socialize, the more distant we become.  The gap between loving and committing feels like a yawning crevasse that widens as we sleep walk through our lives.

I don’t know how we change it.  The internet holds endless possibilities and we as a species do not seem to be able to stop ourselves from making ourselves available to all the idyllicness social media peddles to us on the daily.  Why love completely when you can love temporarily?  So important to keep your options open, just in case...just in case of what?  More time to experience the misfiring of all our needs and wants, landing us, once more in a situationship that lacks anything real, or good, or life affirming.

So I sit love out.  I know how amazing it can feel.  I know how much my life and living is buoyed by love requited.  But I have to say, the more I see of us attempting love, the more disenfranchised I become. The more self affirming it is to love myself and not let others in.  The more I find myself wanting but not capable of all the things love commands to really read as a love story.  The more I become despondent about our humanity and capacity for love...

And the more I want it, the less capable I feel of ever having it, daily, as each new day dawns...

Again, still...