We all want love that feels effortless. The kind of love that flows back and forth between two people smoothly and naturally. The kind of love where we don’t experience despair, anxiety, self-doubt, or uncertainty about our partner’s feelings. That kind of love absolutely exists and it’s a gift when we find it.
But not every love story unfolds that way. Some relationships are hard to establish, or hard to maintain, or hard to end — some are all of the above. They may even be hard to categorize. Fighting for them may be exhausting at times, and we may find ourselves wondering if we’re wrong for trying.
I don’t think we are.
Loving someone often feels mystical and beyond our control, but staying in a relationship is a conscious choice we make for many emotional, psychological, and practical reasons that are unique to us. If the relationship is hard and we choose to stay anyway, that decision is valid. Even if others don’t understand it. Even if we don’t always understand it ourselves.
I have watched many people I care about pour time and energy into relationships where the challenges seemed to outnumber the benefits. I have thought to myself — and in a few cases said to them — that a relationship that requires so much work probably isn’t worth it. I may have been right in certain instances, but the truth is, that opinion is irrelevant; only the people within a relationship can know what they need from it, and whether it is meeting enough of those needs to continue.
It took being in a hard relationship of my own to fully realize this. I was constantly cycling between highs and lows in search of stability that never seemed to materialize. I often felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. And while I was busy navigating the ups and downs, I was putting almost equal effort into defending my efforts and the relationship’s value to friends and family members.
They weren’t wrong to want me to find an easier path to love, and if that path had been open to me I would have gladly taken it. But for the time being, the love I was giving and receiving wasn’t the easy kind. It was the exhilarating, nauseating, exquisite, and overwhelming kind. And what I needed was to experience it on my own timetable and decide for myself if the relationship was one that was worth the effort. No explanations, justifications, or excuses required.
Hard relationships are…well…hard. But they can have their wonderful moments too — the moments when our connection to the other person is so powerful that we forget everything else. At the very least, hard relationships teach us more about ourselves and what we want and need from a partner, and those lessons may take a while to learn.
Even when love feels effortless, the relationship between any two people requires effort to nourish. Do some relationships take a lot more effort than others? Yes. Do those relationships often seem illogical and confusing to outside observers? Yes. Is it okay to follow your heart and keep trying to make them work anyway? Absolutely.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Capstone Events on Unsplash
