I started wrestling when I was 12, and since then combat sports has been the center of my world. Everything (I mean, everything) has revolved around grappling, training, and winning titles.
One thing that happens when you grow up in the world of combat sports and martial arts is that you’re constantly encouraged to draw comparisons between your sport and your life.
In some cases, this great, because life is a lot like a wrestling match sometimes. I’ve written about this quite a bit, and so have the stoics. The give and take and micro battles required to progress through life are a lot like the battles you might face in trying a wrestling match. Building a business, improving yourself, and acquiring skills, for example, are pursuits that are a lot like a wrestling match.
However, not everything in life is a wrestling match. That’s been a rude awakening for me. My own tendency to view combat sports as a metaphor for life has gotten me into quite a bit of trouble lately. Especially in love.
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Love Is Not Pain
Between trying to advance my career, training to become a Jiu-Jitsu world champion, and improving myself personally, I’m involved in personal struggles throughout most of my day. I tend to get lost in my own “pursuit of happiness” and forget everything else.
A lot of my struggles are created by me — like training, working, and being disciplined — but they’re still struggles. They take a lot out of me, especially over time.
Love should not be like this.
I used to think that love was predicated on pain because I thought that love was something to be won. I thought that I had to earn the right to be loved and that if I didn’t receive the love I felt I deserved, it was because of something I’d done wrong. I thought that not being loved made me a loser.
In wrestling, if you fail or lose a match, you’re told that it’s “all on you”, and that you just have to work harder to get the desired results. You’re told that you “get everything you earn”. With love, this is a half-truth.
Sure, work is required in love and relationships, but love shouldn’t feel like the torturous physical pain that one goes through when trying to prepare for a wrestling tournament or any other difficult competitive endeavor. I’ve competed in martial arts at a very high level and I’ve been in love. They are not the same.
Love is easier than fighting. If it’s not easier, it’s not love.
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You Can Quit Relationships
In the wrestling world, you’re not allowed to quit. Ever.
One of my high school wrestling teammates even got the words “NEVER QUIT” tattooed across his forearm. Due to injuries, this athlete went on to quit wrestling in college to pursue sculpting, and he became the laughing stock of our high school’s wrestling alumni.
Quitters in wrestling are shamed, and that’s super fucked up.
Wrestling (like love) is an allocation of your time. If you’re told you can never quit something (and that doing so is shameful), you’re on the way to becoming a slave to the time constraints of others. Love is not compulsive people-pleasing, it’s voluntary.
In life, we have to do a lot of things that we don’t want to do — paying bills, going to work, brushing our teeth, etc — but being in love should not be one of those things. We’re not required to be in relationships and we’re not required to be in love. We don’t have to struggle just for struggle’s sake. We struggle to grow. If the growth is no longer worth the struggle, you should just stop struggling.
I’m not at all saying that people can’t quit things (I think people are pretty resilient and should definitely quit things they don’t like), but the culture of the sport of wrestling despises quitting. Similarly, our relationship culture also despises quitting and taking breaks during relationships.
If your relationship doesn’t “make it”, that’s seen culturally as a personal flaw, not a matter of circumstance, incompatibility, or conflict of interest. That trope needs to die. We need to make quitting cool again to make love easy again.
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You Can’t Win Love
In many aspects of life, there is a clear-cut winner.
In business, the most successful business is the “winner”. In wrestling, the winner is the athlete who gets his hand raised at the end of the match. These competitions have clearly defined rules and thus the “winner” is the entity that is able to best exploit the rules for their own personal gain. It’s kind of a capitalist, cutthroat way to see the world, but that doesn’t make it wrong all the time.
Love on the other hand doesn’t have any rules, and it certainly isn’t a competition.
Culturally, we have commodified love. In doing so, we’ve created socially constructed “rules” for love and how it works. We’re told that love looks a certain way, feels a certain way, and that people in love act a certain way. Instagram is great for reinforcing these falsehoods.
That’s just not how love works.
I know that that’s not how love works because, well, I don’t know how love works. Love for me might not look the way that it does for you. Relationships between different people always look different. Toxic relationships don’t all look the same and neither do healthy ones. This isn’t Brave New World, we’re all unique individuals with unique needs. Call me a snowflake, but I’ll stand by that statement.
By trying to “win” love, you’re reinforcing that you’re not worthy of it as you are — if you didn’t win it. That’s just not true, and limiting beliefs like this hold us back in our experience with love.
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Closing Thoughts
Martial arts has taught me a lot about life. For my first 22 years or so, pretty much all of my life lessons came from wrestling, competing, and the pursuit of victory.
Wrestling taught me how to work hard, be disciplined, and most importantly, how to get comfortable being uncomfortable. As someone who struggles with anxiety and intrusive thoughts, being able to accept my discomfort has been the number one catalyst for nearly all of my personal growth.
That’s why I’m taking a new, uncomfortable step towards love.
Love is not a prize to be won. There is no love champion. You don’t win love and there are no medals that come when you’re in love. The commodification of love has distorted this core human emotion and made it an exploitable part of our capitalist machine, but that doesn’t mean love is a product.
For some reason, we’ve culturally decided to compare love to competition, which is the one thing that I know for a fact that it isn’t. Love is not a wrestling match, it’s something far more rewarding.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Joe Hernandez on Unsplash
