Love is Messy
You need it, but talking about love can feel awkward. You can talk about love with your kids, and you know that you love your partner. But do you ever talk about how you need love?
If you are like most men, you probably don’t talk about needing love. Why is that? Needing love makes you needy? Couldn’t be further from the truth.
In a previous post, I wrote,
Honestly, love is not something I like to write about. Because everything you say feels like a cheesy-greeting card. But love is too important to ignore, to let it go. In fact, love is something worth fighting for.
Love is annoying. It is not inspirational, not flowers and sunshine, and it’s not found in team building exercises. Love gets under your skin and sounds like your kids when they whine in your ear. You can love a cause, your partner, your kids and your family, and you can love your work. But you can’t love a T-Shirt or cereal or TV shows because these things won’t love you back.
Love is found in the mud of life. It’s in the hard work and the dusty corners. Love is in the messes and the dirty clothes. Love is in the scraped knees, the sweat and the tears. Love is a feeling backed up by a thousand hours of hard work.
Love is messy and damned hard work. Love will take you to your personal edge and then it will throw you off the cliff. Love wakes you up in the middle of the night and asks you to clean up the mess that someone else has made. And you do it.
Being in love is not heaven. Sure, love is patient, it is kind, and it is selfless. But love is found when you speak your mind when you’d rather shut up and it is not the stuff that they sing about. Love is persistence, especially when you don’t feel anything remotely like “love.” Love is when you grit your teeth through the hard stuff, the good stuff.
You can’t drink it, inject it or snort it. But you need it if you want to survive. And love is worth it all.
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Love will interrupt you when you are writing about love. Love will call your name when you’d rather just lay low and chill. Love will get mad at you and on occasion, it will even swear at you. Please don’t take it personally.
You will know you are well along your maturity when you can love yourself. And how do you learn to love yourself? Begin by opening up, being vulnerable, love other people and you will begin to love yourself.
You can’t drink it, inject it or snort it. But you need it if you want to survive. And love is worth it all.
I’ve had it up to here bein’ where love’s a small word, a part time thing, a paper ring. Johnny Cash (Solitary Man)
If you enjoyed this article, you will also enjoy the first article in this series on healing: 5 Ways That Will Help You Let Go of the Past and also To Heal, You Must Become the Art.
I write articles about wellness, leadership, parenting and personal growth. My hope is to deliver the best content I can to inspire, to inform and to entertain.
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Keep it Real
Photo by Andy Wright
Old saying, “you have to give love to get love”.
‘You can’t love tv because it doesn’t love you back’ …….and you think a spouse or partner does?!?!? Love is temporary, transactional, conditional and haphazard on its best days, it is cold calculating, suffocation and irrelevant every other day – depending upon how the dice were played at the time.