We often think that we deserve to be loved. For example, take the person who has been in the ‘single wilderness’ for so long, y’know, the place that smugly coupled folk tell us is the worst place ever. So, we’re there, in that forest battling the brambles of loneliness, the ditches of bad dates and the poisonous berries of awkward-pauses-in-conversations-with-friends until we see them, the one! Suddenly the dates are fun and we’ve got so much to talk about and then it’s six months later and we’re partnered, hurrah! And after all that time of being single, as we lay down our head next to that of our partner’s we might engage in an indulgent sigh and think, “I deserve this.” But what if we don’t?
In a previous post I wrote about doing away with the concepts of earning and deserving, and now I’m going to apply that idea to love. The verb to deserve comes from the Latin deservire, ‘serve well’, itself made from de-, ‘completely’ and servire, ‘to serve’. And all this talk of serving just makes me think of servitude and slavery (which was very big back in Ancient Rome). Deserving requires at least a two-way relationship between the person who has done something of merit and the person who owes them something in return. In other words, to deserve something means you’ve got to earn it. Yet all of these words are inherently and historically economic, they are about transactions and I’m not convinced that love can be rendered in a spreadsheet. Love is not a calculation.
Of course, love does involve give and take: we all make changes in our lives to suit our partner/s and the hope is that they will do the same for us. But underneath all this there is a different sort of love: love as an intense, wonderful, biological and metaphysical experience. Love as that feeling when our whole body scintillates at the presence of the person or people we care for. Love as something that sends us to the moon and back. And there is something else that love is: a choice. It’s not just about feeling amazing it is also about taking responsibility for our actions, keeping promises and ensuring that intense feeling translates into something our loved ones can cherish. Or at least that is one way of looking at love should you choose to drop the ideas of deserving, earning and owing. Love is too great to be reduced to a calculation and whilst the idea that we all deserve to be loved is very prevalent I think we can drop the economics and instead choose to love, as simple (and difficult) as that. We can make love a fundamental part of the human experience and hope others will do the same. And I reckon it starts with the simple act of standing in front of a mirror, looking ourselves in the eye, not flinching and saying those three magic words. And we’ve got to mean them too (and if we struggle, we can get a friend to help).
humanconditioned 