I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Partially because I’m beginning to think I’m emotionally disconnected to those around me after undergrad and losing a year of my life trying to move across the country to live with my family. But I’m also thinking about love in a more abstract way, just because I have time to these days. The biggest thing on my mind for this topic: what does love mean to me?
After sitting with it, I think I see love as the difference of nostalgia and potential as they're weighed against each other. Let me elaborate some more. Okay, so I’ll use myself as an example. My brain has a certain level of nostalgia for my Mom and how she was there for me growing up in a way few people were. I used to admire how she was so committed to figuring things out, even if she had to do someone else’s work to get there (in addition to her own). Now, looking ahead, do I see any potential for my Mom to be this person for me ever again? Absolutely not. When I was with her out of state, I saw the lengths she went to never take any personal responsibility for how much her assuming she knew best for everyone hurt other people (especially me).
Looking at this mathematically, because I’m so disconnected that I try to justify my emotions with logic (fuck…), the memory of how downhill my relationship with my Mom has gone minus the faint nostalgia of who I remember her to be growing up gives me a negative value for future potential. Meaning I don’t honestly see her ever being that person for me again. Does that mean I don’t love her anymore? I’d say that’s accurate. And before someone says “but that’s your mom though” while reading an essay where I can’t actually hear you, let’s look more at this emotional math, shall we?
Let’s say love is usually described vaguely as a feeling that makes you want what’s best for someone and for you to be involved in some way in whatever “best” for them ends up being. If you don’t see someone ultimately doing the things you either remember them being capable of or you don’t think they’re ultimately involved in what’s “best” for you (potential, if you will), would you say that feeling is gone?
I don’t ask this rhetorical question to be overly negative. It’s perfectly reasonable to break things off with someone if you don’t feel like they’re good for your current or future well-being; relationships, friendships, family, etc… doesn’t matter. People’s lives are dynamic. What worked in your past won’t necessarily be reasonable as things change. And that’s okay.
To me, at least, the way love develops over time is through actions. Good intentions are nice, but, to use an analogy that didn’t land when I tried to tell my sister I wasn’t going to make it with them: if you wanted to make someone a nice dinner and didn’t know they were allergic to shellfish, your intentions go out the window when your shrimp pasta killed them.
Long-winded analogies aside, my point is what you do in the present has just as much weight on where you stand with someone as what you did for them in the past. I think this is why my parent’s go-to strategy of trying to guilt trip me for not leaving me on a highway somewhere when I was a literal child when I tried to tell them that things they did that bothered me ended up being pointless. If you only offer transactional things (food, housing, etc…) as a mechanism to hold over someone’s head to get them to do what you want, then did you actually care about them at all? Or did you just want leverage down the line? I understand that’s a bit supervillain-y of a way think about people’s intentions, but stay with me.
The point I’m talking around at this point is that if someone loves you and you want to continue having them involved in whatever is “best” for you going forward, you have to earn it. It’s not enough to remind them what you did before as if you’re going to compare a T-chart of what you did for each other when you die. It’s also about what you’re doing for them in the present and for your future together. I want to reiterate, this isn’t just about romantic relationships or family bonds, this can apply to any sorts of interactions people have with each other. I also don’t mean to say you just ignore what people have done for you because it already happened.
If all you offer to someone now is a guilt trip of what you did for them before, you’re not earning any reason to be in their future. If you truly care for someone, then you’ll genuinely want to do the things you think will help their circumstances, whether presently or in the long-term. And sometimes that means a timeline without you (or them, inversely).
I guess I’ve developed this sort of conditional view of love as a result of going through things, but it goes both ways. For all the people I don’t feel love for anymore because the idea of their potential was less than how I associate them in my mind, I flip the logic on myself. There are tons of people I used to be involved with, especially in my family, that I don’t have anything to do with (voluntarily on my end, at least). For them, I don’t blame them if I don’t love me anymore. I’m not there. I left to give myself a chance at some sort of future; a chance to realize whatever is “best” for me. My absence would, logically, make the potential of what I could be for them much less appealing than the nostalgia of how things used to be for us. And that’s fine.
I don’t think love is a permanent state of being. I think it’s a dynamic between people that ebbs and flows as needs change, people experience trauma and success, and, most importantly, they do things to and for each other. By that logic, love can go away as easily as it can start. I don’t know if it’s media’s fault, but the idea of losing love is weighted so much heavier than gaining it. It’s way worse to have a breakup than to start a new relationship. It is my questionably detached perspective that maybe one isn’t better than the other when you look at why the dynamics go they did.
I don’t write this to tell whoever is reading this that the love they feel isn’t valid or anything like that. This is just where I’m at on this topic for now. Maybe things will change. Or maybe they won’t. That would be okay too.