“What did you like about him?” my therapist asked.
A seemingly simple question, yet it hung in the air.
I paused and couldn’t formulate a response. Not because my thoughts were a mess but because I genuinely had no answer. I was in her office talking about my heartbreak. I could describe the pain and the confusion, but when it came to pinpointing what exactly drew me to him, I was blank.
It started to dawn on me that the heartbreak wasn’t tethered to him. In fact, he may have even been a small part of the puzzle. It was about something more profound: an emotional entanglement with the idea of love. Its enchanting allure had become the orchestrator of my turmoil, using him as a vessel. As someone who had always thought loving love (specifically romantic love) would serve me well in life, for the first time, I found myself grappling with the realisation that this very idea, once a source of comfort, had become a source of distress.
Thinking back, I’ve always seen love like water — an essential element for survival. It nourishes us, allowing us to build connections that enrich our lives with warmth, depth, experiences and meaning. And who wouldn’t want that? Love requires vulnerability and so it is scary. Love is also a skill and so it requires taxing practice. Hence people often push love away, opting for the safe and easier route in life, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want love.
Going deeper, previously when I thought about love, I’d reflect on my future. My future husband (for which I had particular criteria), kids, a big house with all the other ingredients for a fairytale you can think of. It was the ultimate version of happiness that I saw for myself. To be honest, it was the only version of happiness that I saw for myself. I was so convinced that the dream would become a reality, that I struggled to fathom how my future could veer off that vision.
But given that I see love as something that can bring me extreme happiness, is it problematic to be steadfast in such a vision? Is it problematic to love love?
Here, it’s important to separate the reality of love from the idea of love. Love is romantic. But love is also challenging, imperfect and complex. These aren’t terms we naturally associate with the word “romance”. So issues can arise when we overly romanticise the idea of love. It can make us suppress the negative elements of love and focus on our ideals, including ideals for a partner, meaning we fail to appreciate them for who they are. Instead of cherishing the person before us, appreciating their authenticity and celebrating the qualities which drew us to them in the first place, we focus on how we can mould them to our ideals.
Having a somewhat fairytale idea of love can also create rigid and unattainable expectations. Our narrative is crafted by dreams (and remember, dreams are akin to fantasy), making us less likely to be content with and appreciate the genuine efforts of our partner.
Personally, my relationship struggles have less so been to do with what my partners have or have not done, but instead, discerning how I truly feel about them. I’ve often found it difficult to segregate my authentic emotions from my idealised narrative. Put simply, do I love my partner, or do I love that they tick the requirements of someone who could offer me my fairytale? If someone else were to provide a more accurate vision of the fairytale, would I still love my partner?
When I was deeply entrenched in the fairytale, I would sometimes find myself so immersed that I would lose sight of who I was dating. I was so in love with the fact that they enabled my dreams that I forgot the need to learn them to understand whether I could be in love with their core. My idealisation shifted the experience away from the nuances of genuine emotional connection and diminished the significance of the person. It led me to question whether my penchant for dreaming was problematic.
During my many hours of therapy, I was encouraged to query the rationale behind my dreams and the qualities of love I deem essential. Why was having this idealistic love so important to me?
In summary, I place a very high value on love and so would seek my most perfect version of it. The problem with doing this was threefold. Firstly, when dreaming of my future life, I’d predominantly focus on what my partner could give me, such as stability and security, which provided the perfect backdrop for role fulfilment to take centre stage over the individual. Secondly, by convincing myself my reality would exactly equate to the dream, I did not allow space to see the beauty in people’s imperfections or for the uncontrollable elements of life to exist in tandem with the dream. Thirdly, as my fairytale vision evolved, tying someone to that specific vision left them lacking importance when the dream changed. This combination increased the potential for emotional distress and for my relationships to not meet the bar I had set for myself.
Thankfully, I can now recognise how flawed some of my logic was, which gives those dreams less power. That’s not to say one shouldn’t have a dream for the future, but it’s important to recognise and embrace the gradients of life in the real world, so as to have flexibility in one’s dreams and create alternative versions of what future happiness could look like. Nowadays when dating, I’m more focused on determining if and how the happiness of my partner and I could flourish in a relationship.
In my journey, I’ve also realised that it is impossible to fully distinguish between emotions because of the person versus emotions that are moulded by the narrative, and completely making this distinction is unnecessary, because they are inherently intertwined. My love for someone is a function of (amongst many things) the level of emotional connection, chemistry, security and support. These are all qualities I value highly in any love. Hence it’s natural for me to be more likely to love someone who aligns with those aspects. It’s just that nowadays, I’m much more intentional in asking myself what else I do and what else I could love about a person.
Interestingly, one of the biggest eye-openers from my period of introspection was understanding how I can be regressive to my dreams through my human flaws. This realisation made me question how I could not expect my partner to hold human flaws, which would also be regressive to our relationship. In turn, I can offer more grace and forgiveness to those I’m dating.
Learning how to allow space for unpredictability and imperfections to thrive in love has been a fruitful process. But it’s an ongoing one — I’m still in therapy to this day, learning how to rewrite my relationship with love.
However, this journey is not just about rewriting my relationship with love but also celebrating it. The profound value I place on love permeates every element of my life, fostering tenderness and vulnerability in my interaction with others. Approaching life with a certain level of open-heartedness has meant I have been lucky to have always found love, or for love to have always found me! I find myself constantly surrounded by familial, community and relationship love, and for that, I am thankful.
To others, I maintain it is essential to reassess your thoughts, be cautious with dreaming and allow sufficient space for the realities of life to coexist with those dreams. However, love is often illogical, so being a little delusional about it can help open your heart to the endless possibilities that surround it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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