I’ve have to give a lot of relationship advice to people who have apparently based their expectations of love off of what they’ve gleaned from Corinthians or some other cultural equivalent, and I just want to set the record straight on a broad scale in case anyone else out there needs to hear it:
Love is really simple. Stop being an idiot.
I hate that people talk about love like it’s a universal, static entity that looks and acts the same for everyone. It isn’t and it doesn’t. Love can be totally impatient and mean and boastful and insecure if you love someone who is any of those things (sorry to every couple ever for ruining your wedding quote), but then again loving someone isn’t that hard in the first place. Falling in love is actually really, really easy (ingredients: person, time, place, commonalities, forgivable differences, optimism, sex whenever the time comes…still working on the algorithm) - because we love love! We love positive feelings! We want someone to share our jokes and ideas and time with, and we want to be that someone else, because we are alive and capable of procreation. But, and this is where things can get problematic, the way you know how to love people can look completely different than the way that someone else knows how to love people - and that’s fine and normal and the way things should be - but it’s also where all of the toxic relationships I’ve seen have had their problems. The idea here, or the primary main objective, is to have healthy love. And that’s much harder to come by than just love. Mostly because it requires you to be a healthy person in the first place.
The thing that frustrates me is the normative culture sets people up to feel guilty or inadequate if what makes them happy isn’t conventional, and then most people end up internalising those standards even if they don’t value them. Not everyone wants flowers in the office and couples portraits and texts every hour on the hour, the same way not every couple wants - I don’t know - reading together in bed and getting gifts from tag sales and communicating serious things through jokes. That’s fine. That’s good. Different things should be meaningful to different people and the fact that they are shouldn’t be a source of guilt.
That said, no matter what the love you’re in looks like, it should feel good most of the time, because that’s the whole point of the exercise. It shouldn’t be damaging. When people talk about love requiring sacrifice, they’re not talking about self-sacrifice. They’re not talking about putting aside your happiness or priorities so that some other person can benefit from you or your talents.
That is idiotic and that will kill you.
When people say “love takes sacrifice” they’re talking about learning how to think on behalf of two people when it matters - how to empathise - so that you don’t end up hurting someone that you care about when you make decisions. They’re talking about healthy love. The thing you’re sacrificing is being the only person you think about 100% of the time, and since you were probably a lonely loser before you found someone - and because you’re sweet - that’s probably something you did early on without even realising you had done it.
That’s it. That’s the line.
If you’re sacrificing more than that, well, RED FLAG! If there’s one thing you’re not doing in a healthy relationship, it’s subverting your voice with someone else’s - and you’re definitely not allowing someone else’s needs to categorically and indefinitely fall in front of yours.
If you are allowing someone else’s needs to fall categorically and indefinitely in front of your own that would be called motherhood. And, even then, if the child is toxic you cut that dweeb off and let them figure out how they’re going to finance their third trip to rehab on their own.
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