In an earlier piece, I wrote, “Unrequited love need not be painful.” This is really surprising to most people. It was even surprising to me. Though, once I noticed, it was easy to reflect back on many times in my life that it was staring me in the face.

Being Loved

What is it you feel when you feel loved? For me, there are two main pieces to the feeling of being loved by someone: I feel protected and revered. I feel like someone is on my side. I feel important. I feel invulnerable. To me, it feels like this comfort and security come to me from the other person.

I don’t, however, feel happy. I mean, a place of safety and comfort does make it easier to be in touch with joy and happiness. But, the feelings of joy and happiness feel, to me, like they come from within rather than from the other person. The other person might give me a space in which it is easy to be in touch with my joy, but they don’t give me the joy. I find the joy in the moments. These may be moments that we are sharing, but the joy is in the interplay of my heart with the moment not their heart with mine.

Loving Someone

Conversely, loving someone is vulnerable. It is moving forward with abandon to where your heart could be hurt. It is spurning safety and comfort in order to feel and to express joy completely.

Freud would have us believe that loving someone is inherently sexual. It is finding a way to replace our mother’s breast as our source of satisfaction. To me, that is a sad, exceedingly sad, limited, exceedingly limited view of love and of life. Give me Whitman instead. Let me sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world!

Love is joy!

What We Can Control

We have neither love potions nor magick spells. We have no talismans to ensure that someone’s love for us never fades. We have no control over being loved. Any comfort we derive from being loved, any invulnerability we feel from it, is inherently unsustainable. It is beyond our power to make it last. Oh, but there are so many fairy tales about those who thought they could control someone’s love.

The closest we can have to control in being loved is to feel a certainty that that love does not define us—that should that love fade, we will not wither with it. The control we have is to know that we can enjoy that love while it lasts, and we can thrive even if it ceases thriving.

At the same time, we are entirely in control of who we love. We all know (or have been?) people who have loved someone cruel or indifferent. We all know (or have been?) people who have rejected someone adoring. Being in love with someone has so very little to do with them.

Some people are easier to see your love for. Some people are easier to sustain your love for. But, it is so much more about you than them.

Go Forth and Love!

I challenge you to think about the people you love. Are you holding back on feeling the joy of your love for them for fear they do not reciprocate? If so, I challenge you to tease those two things apart. Feel what comfort you feel in their love for you. Feel all of the love you can feel for them, even if that might be a hundred-fold more than what they feel for you.

If their love for you fades, will you feel better only having lived a small sliver of the joy of your love for them? No.

The joy is in your hands and in your heart. Live it!