Love’s Struggle and Strangle

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Love is a bitch.

Not not worth it, of course, but it is a beautiful complexity of biological, psychological, and temperamental differences between two people that creates a storm-like tornado of chaotic color and divinity in life.

Love will never not be worth it, from my perspective. Even in pain and cloudiness and unbearable dissolution, we learn lessons about ourselves.

It took a long path to discover it.

And an alchemy of changing the idea of love from a rustic iron, into an invaluable gold.

And from a romantic’s point-of-view, it will never not be full of war-cries, slaying dragons, climbing towers, devoting forever, passionate sacrificing, and defending honors.

It wouldn’t be love if it was simple, passive, and predictable.

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I think that it’s ironic that myself, someone who wanted romance and partnership so badly, has also experienced it, statistically, far less than any other 38 year-olds of my generation.

I never had a relationship last more than a year. And I can honestly admit to myself that there were only three of them that show any significance to being called relationship worthy.

The rest of my dating has been a scattering of chances across a couple decades. I’ve spent no more than three years total committed to women.

So, you’d guess I’d probably spent most of the rest of that time in flings and situation-ships and using women for sexual encounters…

Nope.

At this point, it makes people think that something could be wrong with me. That I’m somehow broken, or too picky, or not trying hard enough.

It couldn’t POSSIBLY be that I had a cataclysmic heartbreak that forced me to look into myself and become a better man, so that I could create something deep, healthy, and transformative for the next person in my life.

…

Through my twenties and thirties, I’ve spent most of my life avoiding women, either out of fear or bitterness. Years of turning away and bypassing opportunity. Years without flirting, without committing to a person, without supporting and confiding in someone. Years taking on solo car rides, single-person dinners, window-seat vacations next to strangers, and a large, empty bed.

And I’m only 5’3”. That’s a lot of extra real estate, for a semi-minimalist.

I’m not complaining though.

Not anymore anyway.

As much as I hated all that time alone and as much as I just wished for someone, those years have taken me through Dante’s Inferno. To a point that could possibly been the darkest depths where I meet Satan himself and sacrifice myself to his devouring.

And just like Dante, I finally passed through a portal, from the deepest, most hopeless space of insignificance, into the next realm: purgatory.

The place where all people on the journey toward paradise must shed their sins. Where we must see our excuses, our own ignored responsibilities, our self-indulgent tendencies and disloyal attitudes. Our constant blame about the world and it’s problems, in which we neglect our rationalize our own…

And give them up for something more divine.

A higher calling.

A focus on meaning and humanity.

Where we can take on the burden of our own unique gifts and give them to the world.

And if you’re thinking it sounds easy, you’d be amazed how often we do that.

And so I find myself in a healing, rebuilding of my masculinity. Something I’ve been missing my whole life, and is such an odd experience.

I’ve never felt like this before.

Sure.

Powerful. Full of potential.

Willing and proud to find new responsibility and being myself without acting out in a way to be accepted first.

But the only way I ended up here was through.

Being insecure. Feeling stupid. Feeling passive. Putting others’ feelings and opinions above my own.

Enjoying and believing in my why I’m here. Honoring myself and my words.

It’s a euphoric mind-fuck.

…

A year ago, I’d still be complaining.

Spiraling deeper into the depths about how invaluable, how useless, and how unattractive I am. A few highs, and far more lows. An unpredictable, inconsistent, and destabilized existence.

No matter what I did, knowing that no amount of time or progress will make me good enough for love or respect or appreciation.

But, the night is darkest just before the dawn.

And now I find myself shedding my boyhood — finally.

Falling in love with the things I’ve been afraid to love: obsessing about my dreams without shame, dark symbolic art, philosophy about life and death and love, and overall…love for myself.

Stepping into the role I was meant to be in.

…

I can see it now.

Not loving myself is why my relationships failed. It’s why I spent so many years alone.

And anyone from the outside could say, ‘duh.’

But what we need the most in our live’s to find our way is often the hardest one to find, let alone understand.

Love for me felt conditional when I was young. I unconsciously learned to perform in order to feel safe. To be accepted. To be considered.

But when you condition yourself to be inauthentic for the sake of acceptance, you eventually find out that your soul will always ben in conflict with your expression.

Alignment is always off.

Mind and body never in-sync.

So, for years I was tortured.

From the outside, I looked frantic, desperate, unbalanced, unsafe, insecure, unstructured.

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Love is many things.

Lust, sexuality, irrational craving.

Devotion, commitment, and sacrifice.

Patience, presence, acceptance.

Values, relatability, beliefs.

And at it’s best, it’s all of those things.

If it’s only a piece, it doesn’t make it evil or immoral.

If it’s a whole, it doesn’t make it divine or invincible.

Love is what we make it.

And it took me forever to realize that I don’t have to be perfect to know it, to have a piece of it, or to want it.

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Life is always better with love.

Time away is great for psychological and philosophical review and dissection. In fact, I think we’re unhealthy if we don’t voluntarily take time to be single and know what it means to be independent and self-loving.

But life will always be better with love…if we can commit to finding a healthy version of it.

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It’s impossible to truly hold on to love of another person I think if you don’t know how to love yourself.

And, though I don’t recommend trying to figure it out on your own — get a fucking therapist and/or have make the best of your friends and family — loving yourself isn’t a prescription.

It’s a wholistic realization that loving yourself means accepting your life’s obsessions, doing the work you want to do in this world, expressing your true self without shame, and not acting out in the world in a way for people to love you, but acting genuinely and lovingly without fear in which great humans — and potential love — will gravitate toward you.

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Love from others is a magnet. It’s polarized.

The stronger you’re yourself, the more you love yourself, the stronger and more genuine the people that will come into your life and love you.

Love is struggle, but it’s worth it.

We are definitely better with it.

Love isn’t a performance, it’s an experience.

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Truth and Love, Reader.

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