love: a user's manual

love: a user's manual, upload feito originalmente por fubuki.

I think we all have a grasp on how to give love, but we're not so clear on how to be loved.

What a complex subject, no? How to complete the circuitry of love? It is not enough to give love; you need to learn how to receive it.

I love you. These scant words are some of the most powerful ever crafted. Just three words, three simple monosyllables carry enough force in their utterance to change your life, fire your passion, calm your fears, and strengthen your heart. It only takes one word, sometimes none at all, to inflict pain, to destroy. But to enliven, to fulfill – these are the words you need.

It’s easy to give love in any of its flavors – strength, submission, sharing, support – but to accept it, to believe in it, to be in it, there’s the witches’ brew. Two people can be in love and yet be painfully torn apart by the dark matter of relationships which seems to amplify the contrasts between them. In time, those contrasts calcify and henceforth every conflict is another hard-toothed grinding on the relationship, slowly wearing down the partners, indifferently cutting away at the bonds of their affection. Like a cancer, it metastasizes as it grows and poisons the healthy connections between you, so that soon there is no sane, safe refuge in your love. Eventually, but not fatalistically, the lovers fall away or flee from each other.

I love you.

It builds and affirms. It gives comfort in uncomfortable silences. It’s a knowing hand that says ‘I am here. I am with you.’

Giving love – the will to intimately connect – the I love you part – is powerful medicine, and is innocently assumed to be soul of a strong relationship, but giving love must be married to accepting love. If everyone speaks and no one listens, there is no conversation, only cacophony. Accepting love is harder for many of us. Since childhood, we’ve known that attention is a precusor to affection, which we crave. We are programmed by feedback that certain behaviors return certain results. If the affection is not forth coming, we revert to the first need: attention. We lash out, we manipulate, and we hurt because it works. Eventually someone will stop you, no? Benign at first, it too grows as we do. It becomes more sophisticated, less blunt, and more surgical. We learn to incorporate distrust into our decisions.

As a young mind begins to peer in on itself, it questions the lack of affection and usually arrives at the naive conclusion that it is lacking, unworthy of affection.

We’ve all walked with strident optimism into those early relationships, nervous and excited at the possibilities, untouched by hurt, only to return shortly later bruised and bewildered. Your hide thickens though, and in many cases becomes a wall of stone.

To some, myself certainly included, a relationship in love can devolve into a game theory; how to maximize affection with the least vulnerability. Boundaries and barriers are established and manned, tests of initiation and validity are undertaken. Scales and scanners are brought out to gauge the other, to evaluate how much vulnerability should be risked in this venture.

But this is the path of diminishing returns and broken hearts. Avoid it, friend. Pull up your sleeves and dive into the tall grass. You will not know the fulfilling, regenerative strength of love until you can accept it as well as give it.

But to accept and embrace the love of another, you must first accept and embrace yourself, complete with flaws and failures.

Only you can open this door, so your lover may join you.


dedicated to my wife, Lee. Semper.

Upload feito por fubuki em 13 Abr '08, 5.29 ART.

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Seu post: I think we all have a grasp on how to give love, but we're not so clear on how to be loved.

What a complex subject, no? How to complete the circuitry of love? It is not enough to give love; you need to learn how to receive it.

I love you. These scant words are some of the most powerful ever crafted. Just three words, three simple monosyllables carry enough force in their utterance to change your life, fire your passion, calm your fears, and strengthen your heart. It only takes one word, sometimes none at all, to inflict pain, to destroy. But to enliven, to fulfill – these are the words you need.

It’s easy to give love in any of its flavors – strength, submission, sharing, support – but to accept it, to believe in it, to be in it, there’s the witches’ brew. Two people can be in love and yet be painfully torn apart by the dark matter of relationships which seems to amplify the contrasts between them. In time, those contrasts calcify and henceforth every conflict is another hard-toothed grinding on the relationship, slowly wearing down the partners, indifferently cutting away at the bonds of their affection. Like a cancer, it metastasizes as it grows and poisons the healthy connections between you, so that soon there is no sane, safe refuge in your love. Eventually, but not fatalistically, the lovers fall away or flee from each other.




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