#13 We contain multitudes
about fully loving the people you love
As I tend to do with these essays lately, this one is also inspired by a conversation with a friend the past Sunday. We sat across each other in her new shared apartment, a grey two-seater, the sunlight streaming in through the windows. April is here and it's like a switch: As soon as the Sun rose on Sunday, so did the Spring. (Hopefully, it stays this way).
First of all, HAPPY SPRING! The Spring Equinox already happened (on March 20th), but mostly, I feel a little bit relieved that April is here. March was extremely difficult. I am trying to live alongside grief, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago — I am trying to learn and also make room for it in my heart alongside all the other things and people I love. It's been a really strange time for this reason, along with a bout of housing insecurity and what this human-focused, everyday life thing means in the face of something like confronting life when it transforms into death. Very existential and also very mundane extremes. I'm sort of relieved April is here.
Mostly I've thought about love and how we love people in our lives again. Losing someone close to me has only made me think about this a bit more, not less (I think it will be something I think about, on-off style, for my entire life). A friend of mine and I sat down to dissect a few things, as you do, the latest being the inner workings of a romantic relationship in her orbit. We eventually get to the topic of the reality of loving people vs. the dating “culture” at the moment. My friend is in a five-year-long relationship that began when she was eighteen. I am on the opposite end of the spectrum at the moment and have decided that at twenty-six, I've had enough of situationships.
What makes people so afraid to put themselves fully, really out there in the dating landscape? I hypothesize that it's because many of us are just people who are scared of being hurt, or experiencing pain. Especially because dating is such a vulnerable process. It can get really gnarly when you show someone who you are and hope that they'll like you. Putting yourself out there is feckin hard.
We continue this conversation and arrive at what I wanted to write about today: when it comes to dating, I've noticed two things:
People use the phrase “don't settle!” a bit too liberally about partners who actually are pretty great, just not absolutely perfect.
Similarly, people can hide behind nitpicking a potential partner for flaws, quirks, or simply “icks” as reasons to not invest themselves in each other, or allow for love to happen for each other.
I think both are pretty intertwined. We have the fear of settling because of the illusion of a million suitable partners (whether through dating apps or at the local bar, the next party, or your friend's cute friend who was always cute but you never went for), so what if there's someone better? Or what if they don't make us feel butterflies every time we see them, or what if they have a few odd habits that we just cannot stop ourselves from fixating on?
Then I think about how dating is, essentially, hanging out with someone. A lot. Add the intimacy of romantic relationships, yes, which may range from sex to any other thing that you consider exclusive (or more heightened, more special, reserved) for a romantic connection. And then I think about one of my best friends, and how I've been hanging out with him for the past 8 years.
There are things I do that drive him fucking insane. For example, I apparently always look like I could not be more disinterested in whatever he has to say because my eyelids are always a bit half-shut. I usually point at things or look at him as a way to try to tell him what I want, and then he asks me to use my words (yes, sometimes I am a toddler). I sometimes am too late to the grocery store for our dinner runs, and this drives him nuts. Other times I argue with him just for the sake of it, and this also makes him want to strangle me.
But he loves me anyway because he chooses to.
It's a bit insane to me that in the midst of Dating Culture nowadays we don't stop to think how the people we already love have all kinds of things that occasionally piss us off. And it's fine. I mean, I doubt there's a single friendship in my life that is absolutely frictionless. There is always going to be at least a little friction, in some way or another. But that never meant I need to end the friendship. In most instances, the most uncomfortable conversations I've had with friends have ended up in some greater understanding of how we both work: what we like, what we don't like, but most importantly (and this is where I think most of us have convenient amnesia when it comes to dating), what we need. How something feels to us. Because those are important.
If anything, they're the most important when it comes to the quality of all our relationships - from friends to family to lovers to sItUaShiOnShips or whatever. (I fucking hate those and I'll never be doing that shit again. If you catch me in a situationship, I allow you to slap me. I'm just gonna tell the next man I date I want to cuddle and build something long-term, and they can figure out whether that's for them, or keep it moving).
Being able to talk about what I need and how I feel has been a years-long journey. It's not easy and I'm not sure it's ever going to be 100% comfortable for me to do. It feels weird. I don't think any of us are ever taught how to share our needs and feelings in an open, conscious way. A lot of us resort to clamming up or to spitting it all out (passive aggression, sometimes repression, and then inevitably exploding in some way we can't control), and it can be anxiety-inducing to think about putting ourselves out there by getting real about what we feel and need. What if they reject us? What if they don't take us seriously? What if they don't like it?
The only way I've managed to do this is by trying it and trying it often. It's always a little scary. I want my best friend(s) to read my mind. I want them to just know what I need, based on years of friendship. I basically want them to know what I want at all times.
And then I notice how fucking insane that is, and that I'm twenty-six years old, and that educating the people I love about how I want to be loved, how I want to be treated, and how to meet my needs is actually my responsibility. And then the friction dissipates. Because they're also trying to teach me how to love them, how to love all of them, and that also includes the things that drive us insane.
The bottom line, I guess, is this: we contain multitudes. There are going to be things we dislike about each other. That's just a fact. And to pretend like the person (or people) we fall in love with will be frictionless and always meet our needs and love us exactly in the way we've taught other people we've known for years is really fucking unhinged.
Combine all that with the fact that most of us are really scared of facing rejection and hurt, because so is the nature of romantic relationships, and we're putting a lot of pressure on something that's supposed to be hanging out and then more other fun things like sex, intimacy, emotional connection, etc.
Fully loving the people we already love feels easy, doesn't it? Even though there are things they do or habits they have we don't agree with or love or wanna deal with point blank. We choose to love them in their full glory because those are also parts of them, and loving them means loving the whole, not just picking the parts that suit us, that make us love them, and discard the rest.
So that's also what dating is. You kind of have your list of non-negotiables but it turns out that those are probably more about being a decent human being, rather than whether they're always a little late or get hangry if they don't have 3 meals a day.
I've decided that I need to be surprised a bit more by what I like. That those little things that drive me insane about my best friends are also what makes them a person. And that loving people by choosing to love or celebrate the parts I'm proud of or the parts that I like, isn't really loving people at all.
Dating and romantic relationships are tricky because we're in a wild, wild West and everyone's a little bit terrified of each other, and the hearts they could break. But also, that dating is just hanging out and being open to someone and the multitudes they contain, not just the pretty smile and the strong arms and the funny jokes and the smooth voice (or whatever else floats your boat).
Mostly, I really pride myself in fully loving the people I love. It's taken me a while, and it's been a years-long process in a few cases (like with parents or siblings or anyone you're related to, for a myriad of reasons). But it also means I accept their humanity. I accept that all these things can exist in them and so can my love. And so it follows that we shouldn't think we're settling for a partner, ever, and if we do, maybe we have to ask ourselves if we're really settling because we don't feel fully seen or loved, or if we're just being nitpicky fuckers who don't really want to accept how messy, imperfect and human the people we love are because we might be rejected if we show them ours.
I know there are a lot of think pieces to go around on this whole topic, but I think keeping this one on Being a Person is particularly essential for me. I need to go back to this at some point because I'll probably fall back into the “ick” trap sooner or later. I need a map to go back to why I love and how I wanna be loved, lol.
Thank you for sticking around and for reading. Let me know if any of this resonates, I am extremely curious about this one and what ur thoughts are.
Sending you hugs, and a lot (a lot) of Sun. Happy Spring!
XXX
Clem