(This is just a response piece – and a question. Please feel free to answer in the comments. . What is love to you? (Because I am not sure- I think I might be wrong. I think I have created it to be more about work than perhaps it should.)
“Love doesn’t look like this,” the ex of my ex said in an article.
And I want to say “How do you know? Did you stay, learn, and do the work, or did you leave and chase the next bright, shining, happy feeling?”
What does love look like to you?
To me, it looks like choosing.
It looks like choosing again, when times are a little tougher. It looks like looking at that person – your person – and remembering the good things you love in their heart, when they’re acting like a seven year old. It looks like working to understand. It looks like tenderness when it’s difficult to soften. It looks like reaching for someone’s hand and remembering to connect when we’d rather be in ego and anger.
I’ve decided this is love. And I’ve decided that I’ve loved.
Love never was a “feeling” for me.
But one thing I’m learning in therapy as I do the work of choosing to love myself is :
Someone else’s experience is not mine to worry about.
If someone else decides that “these ten things will support you in the idea that it’s good to stop, drop, and roll,” is a really smart thing,
Then it’s a smart thing for them.
I’d be interested to hear what love looks like to you.
I do know I need to learn to let go a little more quickly. For sure. Some of those “20 truths” (whose truths? My inner gremlin snickers) May be very important for me…
When a Raven is like a Writing Desk 
Love IS choosing. Just as you say. It’s choosing every day. But for me, it’s also a feeling. It’s feeling like a limb is missing when we’re apart. It’s feeling like this twenty some years started yesterday and time is passing way too quickly. It’s realizing he knows me better than anyone on this planet does, and he loves me anyway. It’s realizing I know him that well, too, and that despite feeling I couldn’t ever love him more, another day comes, and I do. It’s forgiving and working on yourself because you see your own shortcomings not because he does. It’s all this and a million more things.
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Ah. I am learning from this. What I read here is telling me that your love also involves being seen and loved and being safe in that. I’ve actually never had that – never been loved for who I am.
This tells me maybe I haven’t truly loved, not romantically. (I do love and am loved by others. Very blessed that way.)
The love I had was perhaps immature on both sides. I don’t mean that in the derogatory way we use “immature” these days: I truly just mean not matured. Not seasoned. It was perhaps based in him wishing for a potential in me, and me wishing to finally reach that “potential” in order that we might both finally fully love and accept each other.
That seems, looking from a distance, like two people who maybe need to go reparent their inner children.
Your answer has given me so much to think about. Thank you!
It’s enjoyable to imagine growing into giving and receiving such a love.
Because with the love I had, I could maybe say that I, too, was looking for him to change- in that I was looking for him to one day turn around and love me as I am. That’s change- it is not my business to choose how someone else is able to receive or experience me. My only business is to accept,
And the step I didn’t take – see clearly, and move on to love that accepts and chooses me, too.
That’s where the self love and acceptance comes in, I guess.
I feel very peaceful with this new understanding of love. Thank you for this gift. ❤️
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