What Love Taught Me

For a long time, I thought love was something you gave. You gave your time. Your loyalty. Your patience. Your body. Your energy. You made space. You forgave. You carried.

And somewhere along the way, I learned to become very good at loving people without always noticing whether I was still somewhere inside the love I was giving. That is a dangerous kind of love. Not because love itself is dangerous. But because self-abandonment can disguise itself as devotion.

I believed that if I loved someone enough, understood them enough, supported them enough, love would become safe. I know better now. Love cannot be made safe by giving more of yourself away. It becomes safer when two people are allowed to remain whole inside it.

That has been one of the greatest things love has taught me. Not through grand declarations. Through ordinary life. Through the mornings when the alarm goes off at three and one of us is already moving through the darkness. Through a quiet I've got you when you don't have the words.

Love isn't proven by never hurting each other. We are human. We will misunderstand. We will get tired. The question isn't whether those moments happen. The question is what we do next. Do we punish? Do we withdraw? Or do we eventually find our way back to the conversation?

I have learned that being heard is different from being agreed with. I don't need someone to agree with every feeling I have. Sometimes what I need is simply: “I hear you.”

I can say: This hurt me. Without saying: You are a terrible person. I can say: I need something from you. Without saying: You have failed me. Perhaps this is what emotional maturity actually looks like. Not never being angry. But learning that truth doesn't need a weapon.

Sacred rage taught me not to abandon myself. But love has taught me something else. I don't have to abandon myself to stay connected either. There is a difference between compromise and disappearance. Between supporting someone's dreams and making their dreams more important than your own existence.

I can be happy with where I am. I can be growing quietly while someone I love is in a season of expansion. Neither season is more valuable. We are simply living different chapters of the same life.

Love doesn't always arrive as fireworks. Sometimes it is a person standing beside you while you stare into the dark. Sometimes it is letting someone chase something that matters to them without making their becoming a threat to your own worth.

When something feels wrong, the old part of us can immediately start preparing for the ending. This is it. I'm going to be left. But the present asks something different of us. Stay here. Don't make tomorrow pay for yesterday. Come back. Breathe. Listen. Tell the truth. And then see what happens.

I used to think the great achievement in love was finding someone who would never hurt me. I don't believe that anymore. I think the greater gift is finding a love in which both people are willing to keep learning how not to hurt each other—and how to repair it when they do.

I don't have to become smaller to be loved. I don't have to hold everything together. I can simply be here.

Love is two people continuing to meet each other as they are. Again. And again. And again. Sometimes in the light. Sometimes in the dark. But always with the possibility of returning. Returning to tenderness. Returning to truth. Returning to ourselves.

And perhaps that is where love becomes something more than the feeling we have for another person. Perhaps love becomes a way of coming home.