Dear Jessica Brennan,
We all talk a big game about love. Love your neighbour. All you need is love. Love is in the air. But is it? Love is more than that fireworks feeling you get when you first fall hard. Love is sometimes difficult and painful. As Pat Benatar sang, often “Love is a Battlefield”. But in the end, love is the answer to every difficult interpersonal question. It just is.
Loving yourself is so important. So make sure that is your priority.
Even if you have to cut someone out of your world. That’s love. Love for them, if you can’t bring yourself to be kind to them at that point in time, and love for yourself if they are so toxic that their heaviness brings you down. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they should own a place in your life. Just because they love you, doesn’t mean you belong in theirs.
Many people spend their whole lives looking for one great love, and usually the reason they don’t find it, is because they have a skewed view of what they are searching for. They desire some surface, fairy tale explosion, when in fact what we all need is a deep, understanding love that has a resilience that can weather the years ahead. The fireworks-love can be found pretty easily, in my experience. That is just-okay love. For-now love. Infatuation, and sometimes obsession-love. That is an emotional reaction based largely on the fear that love will end. It can be intoxicating if the pain of yoyo-ing between being special and being afraid is your thing. (Don’t make it your thing.)
Is that what you want? Or do you want big love? If you want big love, then you have to be willing to break up with okay-love. That sounds easy, but it isn’t. It can feel like giving up french fries for kale, but big love is really what you’re after if you’re seeking. The rest is just saturated fat love.
Big love is not contingent on being loved in return. Did you hear that? You can fully love someone who doesn’t love you back, in fact to be a good person you must learn to do this. I’m not talking just about romantic love, I’m talking about the very essence of love. If you can only love people who love you back, then it is all about you, and that’s not how love works.
Love is an amazing thing, because it can transcend mistakes, and questions, and loss of many things, including a childhood, and leave you still loving someone who didn’t love you well.
Apparently the reason love is so perfect is that it doesn’t require being loved in return. It isn’t a competition. To enjoy giving love, you don’t have to be loved.
One thing I have learned this year, is that to unlock the next level of big-love you must be broken open by a head-on collision with life. That’s how the new, expanded love comes in. That’s how life shows you where to find the bigger love – what matters, who belongs in your sphere, who is an intentional nuisance, who cares and who doesn’t.
Being broken hurts. Losing someone, finding out something, being tricked and betrayed. You don’t heal from these things overnight. But big love will join with truth – sometimes painful truths, and heal the wounds that years of settling for little love has left behind. Big love often brings connection that is so real, that little love seems like a distant memory.
I am grateful for everyone who has been part of my big love experience, even the ones I have left behind.
Dear Jess, love whomever you love. Don’t worry if they love you back, (most people will anyway because you’re awesome) and in your friendships, weed out the nuisances and drama queen time-wasters, allow yourself to be broken, sit in that pain and watch big love come rushing toward you.
Love,
Mum xo
