Just How Important Is Your Definition of Love?

Image by Ron Berg from Pixabay

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I asked my young niece how she would describe love without using the word love and she responded “it is what you feel for someone who is important in your life and the person/people who you would always want to be around until the very end”.

Aside of being my favourite answer to this question so far, it also made me look at the people I love in my life through new lenses, are these people I want in my life until the very end? Thankfully yes. But there have been times in the past when I’d have said no to that question and, inevitably, these people are no longer in my life, which is why it feels like a good litmus test for me.

But I can’t think about love without thinking about emotional entanglement. At the core of my discoveries about life, is this notion that as I was born into a family with a mother and father who – probably like most parents – loved me and wanted a good life for me, but that meant moulding my behaviours and my thinking, even my feelings, so that I fit in with what they and society expected from me.

Let me give you an example. Just today I watched a little boy (he was about one-year-old) and his brother (who was perhaps around three-years-old), playing with a ball. The infant boy clearly wanted the ball all to himself and got very upset every time the older boy went near it.

The kids were split up, neither allowed to play with the ball, and while the older one was clearly upset, the younger one was totally beside himself. This is a great saying as it reflects extremely well what is usually going on in the physical body; the consciousness is no longer at home. He was crying, loudly, clearly distraught, now well away from the ball and the parent was sternly telling him “no” over and over.

But what does “no” mean in a situation like that? If I project myself into a one year old’s psyche, completely devoid of rational thought, this would hold limited meaning beyond my parent’s disapproval. Of what? Of me. Does it mean I am wrong to be this upset? I can’t help feeling the way I feel. Am I not allowed to feel the way I feel? How the heck do I reign in such huge, overwhelming feelings?

As to questions about whether I’m not supposed to be acting this way, showing how upset I am or embarrassing my parents, or not being selfish with the ball, that is way beyond the realms of my young mind, way way beyond. I just need this adult to be able to handle the totality of who I am and all my feelings, if he can’t, how can I?

But the adult can’t or won’t and, since I depend on him to feed me and look after me, I have to take that part of me that is really upset and shove it deep deep down inside – over and over until I learn to suppress my true feelings with such ease I no longer even identify with them.

So then I grow up and my friend watches someone blatantly step in front of me in a line and I say nothing, even though that person then takes the last – say, soda – that I really wanted. My friend can’t believe I never said anything. I am annoyed of course, but I don’t want to create a scene, it feels wrong and, frankly, a bit scary.

My own kids are a bit older but still at an age where they are dependent on my partner and me for their survival needs, and there have been many moments when I’ve been on the parent’s side of that kind of example, and many moments that I too have not acted the way my kids would have liked me to.

Of course, they couldn’t tell me that, they could only express their big emotions which left me feeling turned inside out, in a tug of war between the child-part of myself that learned to suppress such feelings (and would not have dared embarrass my parents like that in public because it would have had consequences) and this other part of me that wanted to figure out how to let my kids express themselves authentically.

This meant my kids’ experience of me was rather schizophrenic, until I was able to learn new ways to deal with situations like that - both inside and out- more consistently. Generally now, if my kids get upset, I simply acknowledge how they are feeling and how I would probably feel like that in their shoes, it’s amazing how it takes the resistance and momentum out of a situation and calms things down.

Yesterday we visited a park with lots of families around and, aside of being grateful for our relative freedoms here in New Zealand, I watched with interest as children universally mirrored their parents, for better or worse. I could envision fast forwarding twenty years and many of those children rejecting the many parts of themselves that mimicked their parents, and their parents before them.

I find myself thinking “These kids take their cues from us, and we are just screwed up kids in adult bodies, they deserve better. Some wear their broken parts more obviously than others.”

In fact, my daughter asked me today who I liked better when I was growing up, my mum or dad. In the not too distant past I would have avoided answering that, out of some sense of misguided loyalty or fear of creating a rift in their relationship with a family member.

Instead I gave an honest answer and I was very clear that my preference was based on my cumulative experiences of kindness versus harshness.

There is another emotional entanglement when it comes to love. Should love be easy or hard? I think perhaps love it easy when it reflects the authentic part of me. But given I spent most of my life walking around in a skin made from experiences such as the one I described above, I did not spend most of my life projecting the authentic me into the world.

Whether my relationships have been easy or hard, they have all reflected back to me what I did or did not want, and therefore have been enormously helpful in pointing the way towards reclaiming the real me.

I am both the injured person and the person beneath the injury after all, and that does not mean I should stay in a relationship because I can see a person’s potential.

Within my relationship with my partner, after our kids came along we got to a point where we didn’t know if we even loved each other anymore. We were mirroring so many parts of our entangled childhood selves and experiences – parts we had denied, suppressed and disowned. And because we loved ourselves enough, and chose our family over going separate ways, we worked on changing who we each are – the less tangled versions.

It reminds me of a Viktor Frankl quote I heard this week “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He goes on to say “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

In my case, while I could have changed my relationship status, I have been in enough relationships to see certain thought, emotional and behavioural patterns recurring, and there came that time to look in the mirror and be honest about what I was contributing that was creating those patterns.

So is love an adjective or verb? It’s both a feeling and a action. But because of these entanglements from childhood, until I figured out who I really am and connected with others from that place, it kept creating entanglements in adulthood.

When my niece then asked “So, Auntie Shona, how would you describe love without using the word love?” it gave me pause. I like her definition, especially when I think about all these entanglements created by parts of myself I’d denied, disowned or suppressed; I wouldn’t have wanted to be with that version of me to the very end, I really didn’t love myself enough.

But I also think of love as being our natural state, when things really hum, life happens with ease and I feel good. When I am not in that state it’s a calling card to become aware of what’s actually triggering me, who I truly am, and own it and appreciate it and put it out there.

So just how important is your definition of love? Regardless of what your experiences have been to this point in your life, we each have the opportunity to experience more love in our lives, starting with the way we feel about ourselves.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Support Are You Blocking Yourself From Receiving?, How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.