She laughed and reflected in her head a moment, biting her lip and trying to articulate a love lost slowly over time.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, love just doesn’t operate in certainty, it changes regardless of how you set up the paperwork.”
Since I was 25 and nearly pressured into the wrong commitment I have been hesitant to move towards contractual love. I decided at 26 that I wanted the kind of love you woke up and chose each morning. To me, a true partnership feels like it should required room for renewal discussions and commitment conversations along the way. For me, love requires a deeper discussion than til death do us part. While forever with the right someone would be unimaginably dope, I am weary of anything promising forever. I am in marketing and physical products have warranties for a reason. So when someone says, “til death” with 40 years left on the clock, I think to myself, what’s the catch?
“It doesn’t matter what you do, love just doesn’t operate in certainty, it changes regardless of how you set up the paperwork.”
Paperwork is one thing, but the deeper truth I found as I sat with my friend, talking about her first life as a mother and wife is that to enjoy love, you cannot focus so much on its promise for certainty. Funny enough, in every American love story, there is a tragedy OR a happily ever after, but that is not love. That my friend is a societal narrative we initially drove to transfer wealth, land, and power. It’s commitment, not love, the two are not the same.
So what is love?
In my conversations with hundreds of people, love seems to be an emotionally charged connection between two humans that drives them both to be deeper, more empowered versions of themselves, together. Love is compassion and gratitude and desire bundled into a care package that allows you to feel your heart beat more profoundly.
Love is not contracts and mortgages and big rings and designer dresses and prenups. Those are not choices of love, those are structures of certainty masquerading as commitment to love. Ah, the catch. In love, certainty cannot exist, in the same way that in birth, a long life can never promised.
What I really wondered when I asked my friend about her marriage was, “What got better?” But usually, people don’t talk too much about what got better besides the wedding ceremony.
So if love is not contractual nor certain, what is it? Well over the years, while I haven’t figure it all out, here are some things I’ve gathered in discussions with all types of lovers:
Love is kind and honest.
Love is playful.
Love is expansive.
Love ebbs and flows.
Love is celebrating the heart.
Love is elevating the mind.
Love is seeing a mirror of yourself in another.
Love is free.
Love is a choice.
Love is not material things.
Love is not a marriage.
Love is not a Facebook status.
Love is not a binding contract.
Love is not pain-free.
Love is not a contract.
Love is not a certainty.
What I have learned from the exercise of speaking to hundreds of married and divorced people over the years, is that we often confuse love with commitment. The two are not mutually inclusive, but we try to make them this way because our minds conserve energy when the world is categorically organized in extremes. Marriage or divorce. Sickness or health. Love or hate. I guess over time, I have come to wonder…
Where is the middle ground in love and commitment? Because it seems, as imperfect humans, we are forcing something so beautiful into a manufactured box we built many centuries ago.
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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.
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Photo credit: Unsplash