Love is a choice
Excellent article – have it saved bookmarked as well.
Part of the problem with love these days is that we take such a passive role in it. We have the mindset that love just comes and goes without our consent or involvement. It’s no wonder we’re riddled with confusion when love mysteriously ends and we can’t figure out why someone who once loved us just doesn’t anymore.
Love is a choice, and this applies far beyond just romantic love. Love is, as you all know, the fiber of our beings. But we’re confronted everyday with things that challenge the durability of that essence. Everyday, in every way, we are slated to either choose love or not.
As much as we can open our hearts to people, we can also close them, without even realizing. The typical love saga of the human variety is when a person sees someone who they are either physically attracted to or whom meets their qualifications for “love” and then they open their hearts to them, attach themselves, and carry on in this high that’s really nothing more than physical and biological bodily reactions. Then that “love” crashes, and it ends. And all the expectations that we had for love leaves us reeling. We’ve learned to identify our worth based on someone else, but the danger is what happens if and when they leave. The problem is that we don’t see love as the light intricacies of who we are, but just a high that someone else has to provide.
But of course, reducing love to those simple terms sounds terrible, but that’s because what I just described is not love. It’s infatuation. It’s attachment. It’s physical desire. It’s human nature. It’s not love. That high we feel is what happens when we couple physical and sexual desire with the opening of our hearts, and it seems as though we are being fed that love through our souls and bodies, and as we all know, when the two combine, it’s euphoric. But those feelings fade, because this is not love. Attraction will ebb and flow, but love does not.
To try to define love is a feat of the ages. Impossible, right? How can any such human words encapsulate all of the moving change love does for us? Well– here’s the thing. The love we are trying to define is so impossible to grapple because it’s a cornucopia of things that yield all kinds of experiences that have nothing to do with love.
Love is soul work. Love can be met and joined with attraction and infatuation and all of that, but love will not fade when those things do. You can choose to close your heart to love, and run away, and avoid it for as long as you can in every way you can think of but if it was really, truly, the other-worldly, almost supernatural kind of love that we can only hope to be graced with at least once in this life experience, it will not leave you. You can love many people, but at the end of the day, the love you need to choose is the love that, even if you close your heart to, still moves you. The love you still write about. The love you can’t face. The love you’re still not okay with losing, that you’re angry about; the love that uprooted your life and contorted your being. The love you ran away from because it showed you who you are without the guise of worth given from someone else. This is love because these are all signs that you are closing your heart and to be doing so, there has to be something going through you for you to be able to close off. Real love will be the love you realize that remains even after you close your heart to it, because it sustains itself. It drives you forward. It brings up all the unhealed parts of you that you have to reconcile.
You can choose to love someone for the rest of your life… and it can be nearly anyone, really. You can open your heart and let anybody in if you choose to. We just usually don’t recognize that we’re doing it. But the trick is, comfortable, uninspiring love will not give you the kind of life you’re seeking. It’s not that it won’t make you happy. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it. But it won’t be extraordinary. It isn’t filled with possibility. The truth is, the real “fairy tale” kind of love is the love that you keep coming back to even when whole swaths of you want to run away. If love is what you’re made of, the love you need to keep choosing is the love that fuels you, and makes more.
It’s time to stop choosing the love that’s easy and painless, and it’s time to start choosing the love that grounds us in the nitty-gritty-tragically-beautiful-emotionally-stoking-heart-shattering-life-changing-I met you and I just knew in that instant kind of experience. We need to choose this not in spite of the fact that it’s difficult, but for that reason exactly. I hope you do choose that. I hope you choose it today. I hope you stop being afraid of what you know to be inevitably true.