What I Wish I'd Always Known About Love

An essay I wrote a couple of years ago that is coming out of the vault to be shared again.

I have never known someone who did not want, or dream about, or fret over LOVE. The need of it is deep within us all, starting with the need to be loved by our parents, and our young friends. Then, one day, thoughts turn to romantic love, and we are never quite the same again, as we go through phase after phase, simply learning what it takes to own that kind of love. I don't care if you are straight or not, ugly or pretty, male or female... for most of us, that cycle seems to have the same steps we must follow before we find what it was we knew we wanted, but couldn't quite identify it properly.

Most of us, at first, confuse lust with love, and try to find it in intercourse, all throughout our teens and early twenties. We think that when we sleep with someone and feel the right connection, we will have found a love that is real. We expect those first lust-loves to last forever, and they rarely ever grow and stay. They instead go out with a nasty argument, a bit of infidelity, or quiet whimpers of remorse. Then we repeat. Again and again, we make the same mistake, because "our hormones made us do it". Some people will never in their lives get past this first phase, as though their hearts are stuck on autopilot and doomed to crash land. For a while, I probably seemed to be this type. At 23, I married a sexy man who wasn't very kind and didn't even speak the same language. Literally. It took him, and the beating he gave me, to figure out that sex wasn't worth the trouble (after many other torrid affairs up to that point), and that it often has nothing to do with love, the emotion we crave.

One day, some of us discover that sex and love are not as interconnected as we had hoped and believed. We decide that sex, while it can be a physical way of expressing our feeling for another person, is not a way to make anyone love us, and does not build it if the love is not already there before we begin the foray into the physical. All during my tawdry years of high school, I had a best friend who was male. We spent all of our time together, but were never sexually attracted. Looking back on those times, I loved him, with an honest, real love. Yet, he was not "hot" enough for me, so I sought sex and romance with everyone else. I think that the real issue is that he was too familiar, and I wanted excitement. I did not need physical intimacy from him in order to love him. Not at all. That relationship should have taught me a valuable lesson, but unfortunately, that lesson came much later. I had many heartbreaks left to go.

Somewhere finally, we start to define what love is to us, yet it eludes as to where we can actually find it. We become seekers, actively hunting in others' eyes for that thing we need. Though we have come to understand that sex and love are different entities, unless the love comes first, we sometimes will revert back to phase one, out of desperation and loneliness. Even the most physically attractive people sometimes feel desperate and alone, because again, physical attraction has little to do with the emotion called love. We start to find fault in ourselves, and wonder if we deserve or will ever find a close, loving relationship with someone. Some of us, out of frustration or fear of rejection, simply give up, and begin to push every opportunity away from ourselves. The problem at this time is that we put this search above finding who we ourselves really are, which makes it impossible for us to open our heart to something as complex as romantic love in the right way.

Yes, I'm going to go back to that old platitude that most of us have heard, and that some probably don't want to believe is true, yet it is. To find love, first, we must love ourselves. To love ourselves, we must know ourselves, and it takes giving up on romantic love sometimes to find who that person is. Most, in High School or College, learn the social and pshycological theories of a man named Abraham Maslow. He created this wonderful little pyramid chart he called the "Hierarchy of Needs". Here is a photo of his chart, for those of you unfamiliar with his theories:

I see something wrong, here. Supposedly, we are supposed to need the steps below to get to the top step. Yet, how can we love and respect if we do not have morality, the ability to solve problems, and a lack of prejudice, or the ability to accept facts? We cannot. So, the pyramid should indeed end with true love at the apex, because it is, in it's true form, the hardest thing to attain, and the thing we all seem to strive most for, and it seems to me that we must be self-actualized (self aware, confident, and comfortable in our own skin) before we can meet the expectations of a lover for longer than the few minutes it takes to have sex. We must realize that we don't need love to be worthy individuals, before we can have it.

My own search continues, for knowing how to find it doesn't make finding the right subject to share it with any more likely... but I know something very important about the quest for love... It's always in the last place you look. Once you find the real thing, you don't ever have to look for it again, because it's yours.