How do you know the right time to tell someone you love them?
How do you know when what you're feeling is love? Who made the rules up for when it's right?
What is right?
I think the rules we make up for love are collective guesses we create to help us feel better about the fact that we have no idea what we're doing and how this is going to work.
Because you can use ALL the "right" formulae and still end up burnt. Or you can jump in with reckless abandon and BINGO, you two end up together forever? Forever?
When do you call it a happy ending? When you end up at the altar? When one of you dies? Is there a "one" or can a "failed" relationship be a happy ending too?
I blame Hollywood for where we are now. They really defined happy endings for us and we're struggling to get them out of our heads. You know, the movie ending with the first kiss. Or a wedding. But what happens after?
When is love enough?
Perhaps, to understand when it's too soon or when it's not we have to understand its definition?
But then that leads to a whole search of "what is love" and we'll be here for days.
I've currently settled with, "If you feel you know, then you know."
I don't think love was meant to be as complicated as we make it. But it is human nature to keep digging until we find understanding. Hence the countless definitions of love we have. "Eros" "Phylios"(?) "Agape". 1 Corinthians 13. "Love is love".
Because love is such a big thing that runs through almost everything we see, do, and think about that it's hard to accept it as it is. Yet, we don't even know what it is in the first place.
I think this discomfort in not knowing is what pushes us to turn love...relationships...intimacy into something so formal and official. I want to say ", especially in the church" but secular spaces have co-opted this behavior too. "The ideal partner". Hypergamy. High-value men & women. Dating up. Dating down. "Date people who like you". It’s exhausting.
I'm not going to fall into the trap of longing for the "olden days" where love seemed easier. But did it? Older generations didn't have the materials we have today. If our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers had the internet I'm pretty sure more of them would have had the courage to leave their philandering husbands.
The community could've been easier to form. Because one of the reasons abuse thrives is because of shame and isolation. We're conditioned to onboard shame when our partners step out on us and we make it our problem. Even the most progressive women I know struggle with this. If we still struggle now, at a time when we have resources to back up our decisions to stand up for ourselves...what more the women who did not have this access?
Love in the olden days was not glamorous. It was not the way. And a lot of marriages did not have love. They had silence and forced forgiveness, and we crafted them into beautiful love stories. Are there exceptions? Of course. Like there are exceptions today.
I think we need to become comfortable with the fact that love and relationships, no matter how well we try to construct our stories, are a gamble. We don't know which ones are going to work, and which ones aren't.
All we have is the day we wake up to, and the decision to try again the next day. I've heard stories of solid lovers, broken because of situations beyond their control - the loss of a child, a mental illness, a physical illness, trauma, etc. What do the formulae do there?
I know of people who didn't look like they would last but have genuinely been blissfully happy for longer than anyone anticipated. I know people who have fallen in love, called it quits, and felt content with that ending. For them, that was the happiest experience of love they felt, and were at peace with the fact that it was over.
I know my personal struggle with accepting the wildness of love comes from my Christian background. Initially, we were taught that if we follow God, and trust His way, we'll find the right partner for us, and our lives will be best. There was a bonus for women: never have sex, don't date, and you'll have the perfect husband.
But, that isn’t always the case is it?
Because humans are complicated and you can’t bank on them. We change — often.
There is no magic miracle to successful love. There is no formula. We find someone, we try, and we see where it goes.
Should it last a lifetime, praise be. But if it doesn’t? We will hurt. We will heal. And we will try again.