Love

True love

Finally the actual post

True love is obvious and simple. Our issue is that we fight for things that aren’t fully love, or exist in relationships where the love that we personally need which is unique to us cannot be met. Love is only achievable when people receive you in the way you need to be received. Spoken to in the way that you can truly hear them. No matter how much you try. No matter how much you genuinely love someone. You can’t make someone love you the right way. You can’t control that. With something so important as love, you think that you could force it. You think that you could try harder, but that’s never the case. Caring needs to be received and given in a very specific way for both people. Issues arise when you can’t accept that just because you both care doesn’t mean that you care about each other in the right ways where your souls are able to open up and bond with each other in the way that you both need.

It becomes a very frustrating thing. You think you’re doing everything right. More importantly you are desperately doing everything you can. You believe that because you likely are. We only have a finite mental capacity and amount of energy to devote to our relationships. Our best isn’t always enough. Our desire to make it work doesn’t effect our skills and abilities to do so. It’s all a two-way street. If you’re unwilling to traverse it together, you’re wasting your time. It is nearly impossible not to be blind to that fact. That is a tough truth to face, but you have to. Relationships are the ultimate 2 player game. If you can’t, you’re hurting 2 people equally. Moreover, this has massive knock-on effects to every other relationship in your life.

If you’ve given it all and they just can’t care about you in the way that you need, you either need to change the nature of the relationship in your heart or accept constant disappointment. At that point, when you’re being constantly disappointed because someone doesn’t care about you in the right ways, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you. You cannot expect people to make square circles. Believing that is delusional. It’s very tough to realize, but absolutely destructive to ignore. You both need to fully express the willingness and capacity to care about the other person in the right ways without asking or demanding. That does not mean it’s always perfect; nothing ever is. That also does not mean you should not communicate your feelings clearly. Great communication is the cornerstone of all good relationships. Love dies in the ambiguity of insecure attachment. Love needs to be worked on and perfected. Love can never be forced. Love must be an innate connection by both people without the concept of reservation or hesitation even conceivable between both people.

The foundation of any great relationship is rooted in this deep connection where you two are tied together at the soul. Everything else can build out from that intense feeling. Security and constraints create freedom. When you feel fully secure with someone, they will always tell you the right thing. Maybe they say what you want to hear, but they are never afraid to say what you need to hear. Especially when you don’t want to hear it. They push you that little bit further. They unlock that higher level when you had already given up on yourself. This is the unique feature of a deep love and connection. Love gives you the space to let it out when you need to. However, that person will also have the bravery to go in and pull it out when you’re unable to let it out alone, or even unable to understand there is something that needs to come out. They are never uncomfortable in doing this because they were made for you. This person colors your world in a spectrum of colors you could not even conceive of existing. You’ll see parts of yourself come out that you’ve pushed down for so long because they didn’t work for other people. These parts are you. That other person doesn’t just deal with these parts; they actively seek and love them. We all need a guide on this journey of life, and a partner provides that.

A partner is not simply content with accompaniment. A partner fully believes in who you are. In doing so, they give you the permission to believe in yourself. Leaving you with no option. You must feel the same way about that person. Every good thing your partner gives to you, you give back in spades. Not because of some vague notion of reciprocity. A great partner, the right partner, leaves you with no other choice. Your innate, thoughtless actions propel that person to their highest possible heights. What naturally comes from them does the same for you. A partner creates a universal pull for you to do the right and perfect thing always. Not globally right, but right for that other person.

That strong feeling has nothing to do with any superficial trait. Love is a deep irreducibly complex emotion. People run from true love by trying to simplify what love means to them. Love is reduced to a combination of looks, status, and blatant compromise on the lowest common mutually agreeable life you will both accept. True love that last decades has nothing to do with any of that. It only relies and prospers when both people have a hold on each other soul without even trying. Made for each other. There is no effort. There is no jealousy. There is no fear. There are no lies or even half-truths; how could you lie to yourself. What you say can’t irreconcilably hurt or harm the person in anyway or drive them away. Everything comes from your heart which is intertwined with their heart. When this happens, the tough conversations are easy and the easy conversations are magic. There’s no fear or second-guessing, just certainty and appreciation that in this one and only life you found the perfect person to help you get the most out of it. You get the ultimate gift of helping them do the same.

Nothing stands still. Everything changes with time. True love only deepens. Every positive and negative interaction leads to understanding that person in a deeper way. Leading to loving their amazing qualities and faults at a further level, a deeper level, one that did not seem possible. That’s why beauty and surface level vanity don’t matter. Because true love exists on a deeper plane of human existence. Past physical presence or daily interactions. Strong relationships exist in your soul. They can’t be pulled out without losing a large part of yourself. There is nothing that you wouldn’t do for that person, but there’s nothing you have to do for that person. You’ve always been enough. Your interactions flow like a brisk fall stream. So beautiful and natural; the greatest combination of death and life. Life can be hard, but true love is easy because it’s in evitable. Everything you do and say is the right thing. You care about that other person more than you care about yourself and they do the same. You can’t fathom a life without them or life where they’re not happy because all they need is you all you need is them. Everything else blooms from there.

Love and attraction is an internal thing. All that matters is the bond of the heart that you find with this person. Once you’ve had it, your world will never be the same. You’ll be blessed and cursed to see the world through their eyes as well as your own. Not because you want to or try to. You just do. There are fights and there are issues but none of that matters. What you have is so unique and transcendent to you both and built up over so much time that there is literally no one else in the world who can complete you in the way they do. They’re fully bought in and fully love you. You’re fully bought you fully love them. Nothing else matters. The deep shame and irony in love is that there is someone, likely a fair amount of people, with the right personality matrix to become your soulmate, but many never find a soulmate.

How are so many people unhappy in relationships. 50% of marriages end in divorce. How can we be part of the happy 50%, who’s marriages end in death? Relationships end when people have stopped inhabiting each other’s souls and seeing the world through each other’s eyes. The world isn’t black-and-white anymore without them, but it’s almost black-and-white with them. Love dies for 3 reasons. First, you never loved them and you both filled a hole in each other’s lives. This is a relationship of practicality. The world of arranged marriages. Except you are the one arranging it. You create a bond around a shared cause or interest, but not with the other person. Maybe you want a family. Maybe you both like traveling. When those proximate causes of love fade, you realize nothing is left because there was nothing there to begin with. Second, the big mistake. This is the one explosive moment that ends a relationship. Whether it be cheating, stealing, or lying. One explosive moment that blows it all up. I would argue that this one moment is a product of the entire relationship anyways. It is not your fault if someone cheats on you, but no one just cheats to ruin the best most genuine thing they’ve ever had. If they are that bad of a person, you are lucky you did not have to wait another day to find out. The big mistake and explosive goodbye are usually the result of a deeper history of problems. It is the larger than average straw the broke the camel’s back more than anything. The explosive moment is the dynamite that explodes the powder keg that is the third, and I would argue the worst and most common reason relationships fail, the slow burn. Through a combination of apathy and random personality changes you have become completely different people. This is deepened with a sense of apathy and loss of wonder in the other person. When you remain inquisitive and curious about your partner, you are able to grow together. Changing and morphing with them. However, when you ignore this growth or even fight it, you are destined to grow apart with your relationship fracturing. Relationships die when you fail to drop your anchor in each other’s souls and instead accept the slow imperceptible drift of each sly comment or negative interaction. These eventually all build up to create defense mechanisms and automatic behaviors you have built up to protect yourself from the person you loved.

These automatic behaviors function as a way to keep those people out. We are constantly putting out bids to our partner to allow them to see us more authentically for who we are. Every time one of those go unanswered the relationship drifts further apart. We have to allow our partner to be seen in the way they want and need by affirming these bids. This allows us to fall deeper in love instead of drifting out of it. Relationships can die from the apathy created by indifference. Only through a willingness to listen, grow, and change together can the slow burn be avoided. When we keep a watchful eye on both our and our partners hearts, we create a relationship where both partners are truly seen.

It is never too late to start reversing these innate reactions and start to see people for who they are. We must monitor our connected hearts and be brave enough to take the first step and call trouble out when we don’t want to see it. Scar tissue naturally forms over time. We must intentionally care for and nurture those scars. A relationship will never be perfect because the world is imbued with challenges. People are constantly faced with momentary decisions that either bind them closer or pull them apart.

Sometimes people grow and change in opposite directions and there is nothing either person can do because love is the ultimate 2 player game. Love is natural and cannot be forced. Love ends the moment one person stops caring enough to put in the work required. Needs change and evolve over time and while we can optimize for a deep genuine connection instead of valuing vanity, we cannot promise people will not drift apart due to no fault of the other. We also shouldn’t needlessly hold someone closer to us when we feel our true hearts separating and transforming. The greatest act of love is to let someone go in hopes they will find themselves and be able to find the genuine love that nourishes their soul. This is an incredibly painful way to lose love.

However, most relationships do not end like this. Relationships instead fracture because of mindless bad communication and being careless with each other’s hearts. Drift is prevented by honesty and truth. Deep and loving relationships can still die when people don’t love each other in the ways each other wants. This is a result of an apathetic approach to drift. Thoughtful and directed living coupled with honest communication can repair small rifts between people before they become canyons. The key to repairing big divides is curing the small ones before they have a chance at growing. This has to be done with emotional openness and honesty. Minimizing your feelings or that of your partner will only exponentially increase the rate of division. There is no secret ingredient to avoiding drift just truth and hard work.

Continue to cultivate the ability and desire to change and grow with a person or you’re destined to grow apart. Anchor your hearts to each other and drift through the seas together riding the waves of life and weathering the storms together. When you do that deeply connected and your love will just deepen with every day. Your relationship will compound. You’ll realize that what you have isn’t just enough; it’s perfect. It is made for you. Nothing that you can write down on a piece of paper or capture in a picture matters. Love is formed in what you cannot see, but becomes present and dictates in every interaction you have with the wider world. Love takes days, months, and years to reveal itself in its many levels and build on itself. Love is looking at another and seeing yourself and looking in the mirror and seeing that other person. This deep love is always out there to anyone who asks the right questions and opens their heart for the right people.

True love has no doubts or compromises or questions. None of it is that deep. It’s just so natural and easy that you wonder how you could be so lucky to have it, and how you could’ve ever lived without it. The most important thing about it is you can’t imagine that they get as much as you do from that relationship. They can’t imagine that you get as much as they do. Every ounce you put in yields a pound of the other person’s happiness, love, depth of connection, and enjoyment. Good relationships amplify. They don’t run. They don’t hide. Good relationships make you realize that they are all you have ever needed and the best thing that you could’ve ever asked for.

Life is finite. Keeping a hold on your heart and not opening it prevents you from living the life that you deserve in this finite time. Find the person that completes you. Find the person that looks into the deepest darkest part of your soul and runs directly into it. Turning that darkness into light. Allow each other to recognize your highest, best, and most authentic selves. Love is the easiest thing that you can do, but one of the hardest things that you can find because it requires you to fully open up and commit to something with your full constitution of being. Love opens up the parts of you that you fear most. There are no secrets, there are no barriers. Mold into one and have the deepest love of your life. It is nothing less than you deserve.