What Love Should Be to You

Some of us were taught that love should hurt a little… or a lot. I don’t believe the people who raised us really meant for us to suffer. Perhaps they confused love with endurance, and, of course, “nothing good comes easy!”

The belief may also have been what helped them stay in something that was hard and make sense of it all.

We then inherited love stories that said, if it leaves you breathless (in all the wrong ways), congrats, you have found the real thing. It may make sense in a different context, but to us now this isn’t love, this is more like programming. This is something that needs to stop lest we keep calling pain by the wrong name.

The dangers of this belief were that it conditioned people to tolerate emotional abuse, gaslighting, and even violence because they believed it was part of love and stayed way too long in relationships that slowly destroyed them.

“His silence infuriated me though. He loved to ghost me for days on end…After months of me trying to keep my cool… I would get frustrated with him for ghosting, he would gaslight me for being overly emotional, I would leave, he would hover, I would think I was being melodramatic and give him another chance, so on and so forth.”
Source: Silence as a Weapon, User, Reddit/r/pnsd

First, what love is not:

Love is not confusion;
It is not silence used as a weapon;
It is not walking on eggshells around someone who claims they would never hurt you;
Love is not control or insane jealousy;
It is not keeping score;
It is not having to give up your voice just to keep the peace;
It is not having to overexplain your boundaries to someone who keeps testing them; and lastly,
It is not needing to prove over and over again that you are enough.

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Stephen Chbosky

What love should be to you:

Love should be safe from harm, safe to speak, and safe to be you. If it feels like always walking through a minefield, that is simply anxiety. And you shouldn’t have to shrink or silence your instincts just to keep the peace. If it is real, love should feel like exhaling after holding your breath for a long time.
Love should be clear, not some mystery you are supposed to solve. It doesn’t leave you guessing: decoding mixed signals and rereading messages looking for hidden meanings. Clarity in love is not too much to ask, it is the bare minimum!
Love should be reciprocal. How else can it be? If you are left carrying the emotional weight of two people, you are more likely in labor than in love. Of course, it may not always be 50/50, but it always balances over time. It also ebbs and flows, but you both always need to put in your best. That is why it is a partnership.
Love should be freeing you, not chaining you. You are not meant to feel trapped, constantly justifying your independence or your dreams. If this is the case, you are being managed, not loved. To borrow a wise man’s words: Love should be the wind in your sails, not the anchor around your ankle.
Love should challenge you, but only in the right direction. The best kind of love isn’t soft because it avoids the hard stuff, it is soft because it will also hold you through it. It will challenge you to grow, but it will do so gently and without shaming: love will not make you feel like you are always falling short.

“Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.” — Maya Angelou

Reclaiming the definition

As most of us weren’t taught love beyond seeking attachment and tolerating confusion and romanticizing it, we need to rewrite the definition now.

So I will ask you, softly: Are you in love or merely in the memory of someone who once made you feel special? You get to choose what love should be to you. If you don’t, someone else will, and they will shape it around their comfort.

Your new standard should be the love that listens, holds gently, and never makes you beg to be chosen. You have already survived the wrong kind. Now it is time to thrive in the right one, and most of all, be the right kind.

“We truly can reconfigure how we see ourselves and reclaim the love for ourselves that we’re innately capable of.”
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection