Where Do We Love From?

I am not sure I can pull this off today. My neck is still out and now I am getting a cold. I am trying not to feel put upon but in reality, I do. I just want to go to work, live my life. Haha. But instead all this pesky life keeps happening!

So I guess it is no accident that I go to this deeper place this morning. The superficiality of my life is less than stellar. I am in pain and now getting sick. So I attempt to avoid the reality of this with getting lost in a deeper question.

To be truthful, I don’t think I ever really thought about this question before this morning. I guess I always just assumed we all love from the same place. Some innate place within everyone that is just welling up and spilling over with love and care and honor and respect.

But we all know that isn’t true. Not everyone loves from this place.

I think a great many people love from a place of hurt. They love to be loved. Not because of the wonderful ways loving someone else makes them feel, but because they need and want and in fact demand love be turned to them now. I think there are many people wandering the globe right now who have no idea how to love or where it might exist in them. They are just trying to get needs met and everyone else appears to be a vehicle to get them there.

I find that most relationships, if the participants are honest, do not really feel loved. They felt likely many other things. But in my experience, especially in long term relationships, most people I talk to will tell me the laundry list of things that they feel in their marriages and relationships: anger, resentment, fear, dishonor, betrayal, and other lovely emotions such as these. Love is not the frontrunner.

Now I am a divorce attorney so I will fully own that no one calls me on a winning streak. But I will have to offer up that I talk to a great many people whose relationships are not on the rocks and they are usually saying the same things. It is rare, very rare, when I talk to someone who is loving and feels loved in their relationship. Most people, good people, have a laundry list of items that they need that they are not getting.

I have thought about this particular subject a great deal. And it wasn’t until this morning when I began to think about where we love from that I think I made an essential connection, at least for me anyway.

I think people tend to love from a place of lack. A place of need. A place of want and demand. Which is a very restrictive place to love from. We are all so worried about our needs not getting met that we forget that in order to receive love, we must first love. Ourselves and then perhaps others. These relationships we have are not really there to satisfy unmet physical or emotional needs. They are there to provide a basis for connection, for service and for a deeper understand of what love and loving is.

Do you know what kind of relationships I see that are very loving? People’s relationships with their animals. Social media is replete with posts about how much they love their cat or dog or horse. And while I am all about this, I also think it is sad that most of the things I see on the socials is about how awful love of people is and how much we love our pets. That is truly a commentary about love and loving in 2024.

And I think there is some interesting and helpful information to be gained about where we love from right here. We are free to love our animals and pets because they are innocent in their love. They are not loving from a place of manipulation or cunning. They are just there, wanting to be petted and talked nicely to, and loved. Pets love from the center of their being. They love with their whole heart, always, no exceptions. People not so much.

And there are perhaps all kinds of reasons for that. Pets like people have awful back stories. They are abused, left, maligned, neglected and treated poorly a great deal of the time. And they like us can suffer such abuse that they are incapable of ever forming another bond with any other beings. So too with us. But pets seem to do a better job of discerning which people are safe and which ones are not. And they take their time, another fallibility of us, our mad rush to find THE ONE which leaves us in a place of being forever shortsighted and long suffering.

So, of course, I have to bring it back to me. Where do I love from? Well, I think that has changed. I used to love from a place of need. I needed you to love me so I loved you the best that I could and then waited (for years) for you to love me back. I completely missed (for decades) that I was often selecting someone who either didn’t want to love or was loving from a place that was very limited and stunted.

I selected these people because I think I was afraid of someone who was more capable of loving from a more open, reciprocal place. I think I became invested in this idea that if I could get someone who was shut down and off to love me that I would win the motherlode of love. Hell, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I just kept loving people who were incapable of loving back, like at all. So I have loved several people who were narcissistic and manipulative which has damaged me greatly.

I loved from a place of brokenness. I didn’t know I was doing that. And most other people don’t either. It takes a loving crisis of epic proportions to get our attention sometimes. And I have just had one of those. I misinterpreted loving words for actual love. It wasn’t. I allowed for shit behavior to be explained away because I just wanted this person to show up for me and care. They didn’t. I wanted something from this other person that they did not have to give and then despite repeated demonstrations of who they were and what they were capable of, I hung in there for years being more and more distraught and disappointed with each passing day.

I loved from a place of brokenness so that is what I attracted. Brokenness. And fuck if that didn’t fuck up my life. It is a bit of a hard lesson to find that the worst relationship you have ever had in your entire life (drunk or sober) was the last one. The one that you have at your highest emotional and spiritual advance. This is still the person I picked. FUCK that smarts something awful.

But, I know always with the silver lining, I needed to love one more time from this broken place in me to see that this was in fact the place I had been trying to love from my whole life. And I can see now, that this was always going to bring me exactly what I always got. All I needed to do was look at my loving history. It really is a line up of my mental illness. LOL.

Actually the best relationship I ever had was right before the end of my drinking. I was with a man who was kind, loving, supportive and loved from a place of honor, respect and care about me. Now of course, my alcoholism and unhealed brokenness fucked that up royally. But it is still the best relationship I have ever had. He was a gem and I couldn’t see that. And I didn’t value him or the relationship because I was too drunk, damaged and immature.

Where a person loves from is going to be a new criteria for me going forward. Remaining mindful about where I am loving from. Am I loving from a place of brokenness where I want or need or expect this other person to fix me or heal me? I can just stop right there. I know where that gets me. Every fucking time.

But now I also know to ask the question, “where is this person loving me from?” Are they loving from a place of need (like they need housing or financial support or emotional shoring up) or are they loving from a healed version of themselves. A place where they are wanting to make a connection because they want to augment their life and loving others is a way in which they accomplish this?

Where do we love from is a vital question. For ourselves and for others. I think if we asked this often and early enough, we might just save ourselves a great deal of trauma and heartbreak in the long run. I guess we also will need to stop the habitual patterns also, therapy is good for that. I am almost to the point of saying that if you want a functional relationship and you have some shit in your past, go on a couple of dates then find a good therapist to help you with your trajectory from there. The money you spend on therapy will save you millions in emotional costs down the line.

Love is a feeling but it is created by action. This is why we love our pets so much. As I write this, I have two dogs snoring gently at my feet and a cat purring on my arm. All are here just waiting for me to engage so that they can freely give the love they feel for me. It is right there, all I have to do is stop typing and engage and I will get to participate in love freely given and exchanged. It doesn’t come with strings or hurt or pain, it is just pure love because that is what they do. They do not know how to do it differently. And this is why I believe there is a great thundering clamor for it in today’s world. We humans are so evolved except in the whole loving department and to be educated we need turn to animals for solace, comfort and lessons in unconditional love and acceptance.

My grandmother used to say (this was before the internet and the love crisis that I believe is occurring in our world today) “the more I see of people, the more I love my dog.”

Yep, grandma, it only took 45 years, but I think everyone else is rapidly ascending to concur with you. And maybe that will be how we will all end up, alone, living with our pets, loved, safe and content.

But if there is a prayer for humanity to love better, perhaps it starts with each of us doing a better job of checking in on where we are loving from and then having the courage to really examine where others are as well. Perhaps if we can stay true to a thoughtful, honest and repeated examination of where we are loving from, we might avoid loving those who cannot or will not ever love us back. And even better if we could avoid the narcissistic fuckers who shatter our worlds, our sense of self and our hearts in the process.

I don’t know, just an idea.

Again…still.