What Is Love?
Photo by Steven Wright
Trying to Find Hope in the Darkness
I have a friend quite a few years ago come and ask me how to stop loving a person that is not healthy for you. She had just spent months following and begging her husband to try and work things out and stay together. She felt a fierce love and loyalty for her step son and didn’t want to raise their new daughter in a broken family. However, whenever her estranged husband did take the time to talk to her, he was so abusive and hateful in the words he spoke to her. They had at this point begun the process of divorce.
She knew that I had a boyfriend years before I met Erik that I was deeply in love with and so she came to me and asked me how a person stops loving someone that they know isn’t good for them. She had just started therapy at the time. She knew she needed to put her energy and efforts into being the best mom possible for her new baby. I told her that she would most likely never stop loving him, especially since they share a child together. I told her that it takes time and over time as I moved on with my life, I fell out of love with that man but I still to this day love him.
Navigating Rough Waters
I had a very intense relationship with a man since Erik’s passing. It was a rollercoaster ride for me, so much happened in such a short amount of time. There came a time when I realized that I was living with a stranger. I didn’t know how I had gotten to that place. As I began to take more and more steps back to try and make sense of the new reality I found myself in, he hated that I stopped saying “I love you” and had stopped touching him and allowing him to touch me at all. For me, when I have physical contact with someone, it can easily confuse my mind because their feelings and emotions wash over me with just a simple touch.
I understand this more for myself now and know what it is and how to navigate it. But, to him at that time, he only saw that I had become cold and was refusing to do the most logical things in his mind to work things out and help make things better between us. I had started to learn at that time that he was a person that used his words to manipulate. His words and actions were anything but synonymous. I told him that he had become a stranger to me, he wasn’t the man that I fell in love with. I also told him that I needed to get to know this new man to see how I felt about him. He was kind enough to respect the no touch request from me most of the time.
It broke my heart every time he told me he loved me and I didn’t say it back because the truth is that I did still love him, I just wasn’t in love with him at that point. I could feel the hurt and see it in his eyes when I refused to say it back. I had to take that time to make the decision that was right for me. And, I knew he was truthful when he said he loved me, he was loving me the best way he knew how. I had just started to see clearly that we had different definitions of love and I did not want to have any part of his definition of love.
His definition of love was that the people in his life said and did things according to his definitions and rules as the man of the house. My definition of love is that my happiness is my responsibility, I did not depend on others acting a certain way or saying specific things to please me and make me more comfortable. I prefer to be around people that say what they mean and mean what they say. More importantly, the biggest lesson I learned from that relationship was that a good person doesn’t spend a lot of time telling others who they are, they just go about their life, minding their own business. In doing this, they show you who they are.
Gaining Clarity
Years later, my friend and her previous husband have been able to go their separate ways and have happy lives. They are able to both have a healthy co-parenting relationship and all the kids are happy and well adjusted. My friend is so happy and living her best life.
Everyone is living their own life and has their own definitions. I found that I couldn’t continue to be with the new man I was getting to know. It wasn’t long before I knew that it wasn’t doing any of us any good to stay together and so I left. It took a long time and a lot of energy to process through that relationship even though as far as time goes, it didn’t last very long at all. On this side though, I am very grateful for all of the lessons I learned because of that experience. I was able to understand myself a whole lot better and see how I could move forward in my life with much more clarity and how to navigate healthier relationships.
This song touches my heart deeply. I know that to many people I have chosen to walk away from to preserve what sanity and strength I have at the time, I have looked cold and calloused. They don’t seem to remember all of the conversations I had with them to work through things. When I felt like I was beating my head against the wall, I had to walk away to get back my life force again, my cup was empty and I can’t pour from an empty cup. What they couldn’t see was that the most loving thing I could do for both of us at the time was walk away and choose to love them from a distance. Just because they couldn’t see the love I have for them doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
