What is "True Love"?
It's a question that's been asked countless times, in countless ways, but the answer remains elusive.
I’ll tell you right now, i don’t know the answer.
I haven’t been in a traditional relationship,
and to some that means i shouldn’t be here talking about things like true love or heartache or loss,
because “what could they know about love?”
I spent a while asking myself that same question,
“what do i know about true love?”
The only thing I feel confident in is what’s defined for me countless times in media and shown to me through thousands of different lenses:
the meet cute, friends to lovers, friends with benefits, sweethearts, soulmates,
a fairy tale,
a romance.
Driven by this passionate desire to frictionlessly connect with someone
and integrate their life into your own;
A magic so perfect it only happens once.
I spent those months on a quest to find a path through that riddle called love.
In the end, I had to admit that there were problems with how I've been viewing love in our media-saturated world.
One Saturday evening I had a rare stroke of luck;
meeting a group of friends with a beautiful inter-connection.
When we met, each had a story to share about their own journey for romance, but what we all discovered in the end was that there was another love there, too: the love of friendship, and family, and fraternity. And as each of them experienced bumps on the road, that love was the thing that kept them going.
That version of true love doesn’t fail.
It’s “true” because the two are always perfect for each other;
not just physically compatible,
but also emotionally, spiritually, and fundamentally.
It also allows you to instrumentalize relationships
by trying to systematize how they “should” work:
Where and why you “should” put energy into them,
and how you’re going to see a return on your investment.
In those love stories, characters often have trouble finding love
because something they do makes them seem unlovable.
When these stories pass through the viewer’s mind on their way to becoming real, the viewer can begin to objectify relationship as something with:
a fixed destination,
fixed milestones,
fixed dynamics,
and fixed consequences.
And so it becomes something to wield and control.
Because I couldn’t see those things in my own life,
I concluded that I was undeserving of love.
“I’m not lovable enough.”
I pathologized love.
That version of true love doesn’t fail.
It’s “true” because the two are always perfect for each other;
not just physically compatible,
but also emotionally, spiritually, and energetically.
I concluded that hard work would illuminate that part of myself
and only then would love arrive to whisk me away into happiness.
And that day never came.
I didn’t move from that point. I was stuck.
Everything became a performance; and all of the world, a stage.
It didn’t change, but not because
I wasn’t worthy or wasn’t prepared enough.
It was just an illusion to begin with,
a performance for myself.
What started as fun stories became mythology to me.
It was mysterious and important, so I had to do everything
I could to go along with things
until I could understand.
But in the process, I cultivated a loneliness and isolation
that soon outgrew me.
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Okay, so all of that is “fake”
and you’re sad about that.
We get that, Ian.
But you still haven’t answered
the question.
What is *your* vision of true love?
I guess my point is that I wish I hadn’t let myself think
that love was this mysterious and elusive thing
I don’t think love, in its essence,
could ever be a thing that exists in a binary state.
There isn’t a requirement on the number of people,
a timeline of events,
or a compulsion to reciprocate;
And it’s not:
“once in a lifetime,” “once upon a time,” or “once we get older.”
Those are hallmark ”signs of true love”, but there are
plenty of relationships in the world that don’t need
that sign of external validation
Love happens inside each of us and it can exist
whether we recognize it or not.
It can be as simple as taking a moment-
and extending it just a little bit longer inside you.
Love is contacting your loved ones not because you want to affect or change their life but because you want to keep them in yours.
Love is the thing that holds relationships together,
not the destination you'’re moving toward.
We don’t exist:
To one day find true love.
Or to find something perfectly compatible with us;
perfectly molded to our lifestyles and lives’ trajectories.
You wouldn’t know if that sort of
relationship was “true” unless it ended.
And how could you know the
true contents of their heart?
I think it’s fair to say that
loving is torture when it feels like a guessing game
Love is cultivated.
It grows inside us to tell us how hard to hold onto something.
Sometimes you continue beside the object of your
desires and sometimes you can only hold it close
inside your heart,
but when you love something,
you keep that desire alive.
Love binds us, internally,
to the relationships we wish to preserve.
And the great thing about that definition
versus
the other is how much room it leaves for growth.
There’s no requirement of a “happily ever after” because it’s
not about the qualities of the relationship.
It’s about the relationship’s ability to bring you together
and hold you steady as you’re being pushed apart.
As we move into the uncertain future, love is the comforting desire to continue developing side by side. It’s the desire to continue relating to one another.
And when you love people truly,
you don’t have to bring a label like:
“partner,” “lover,” “girlfriend,” “boyfriend.”
You just bring yourself.
