WHAT IS LOVE?
7 DECEMBER 2022 (18 MIN READ)
The truth is, we learn how to love by observing the relationships around us and projecting those expectations to significant others as we grow up. In terms of who we observe, our parents and our favorite movie/TV couples are usually the favorite culprits. If we are a man and our father dictated everything our mother did, and our favorite TV couples followed the same formula, then when we eventually find a partner, we will expect her to follow this patriarchal road. This example reveals that what we perceive to be love is what we learned it to be as we grew up. And since most people followed this generational, trauma-infused way of learning how to love, most of us have absolutely no fucking clue about how to do it properly. Our collective education on love is like making people watch, Good Will Hunting, and handing them a math degree. How in the world can we expect ourselves to know how to love when all we have been taught is Pretty Woman and Notting Hill? (Although both completely fire movies. I can’t lie).
In an effort to remove the subjective illusion on what we perceive to be love and give a more objective reality of it that all genders and sexualities can apply to their relationships, this article will teach you what love really is, as well as what you have to go through individually to hold space for it. In other words, this is a written masterclass on how to love. Think of it as, “Love 101,” in a school of life, except I’m not going to be an asshole and give you a C+/B- on your paper just to soothe my ego. In reality, the homework is your relationship and the grader will be your heart. And I hope that fucker doesn’t have the audacity to hand you a C+/B-.
LOVE AS SURRENDER
There are two parts to this class of Love 101: surrender and respect. To properly love, one needs to be able to surrender to their partner and have the utmost respect for them. The respect piece will be handled in the second half of this article, but in terms of surrendering to our lover, how can that be actually done? And what does it mean? In essence, surrendering to a partner means not controlling them, as well as actively working through one’s desire to do so. Sure, compromises are necessary in relationships and problematic behavior should be discussed; however, it should never be done with the intention and energy of control. In order to express how this sort of surrender should manifest itself in relationships, consider three key components of surrender that will come up in any relationship: surrendering to their path, surrendering to their trauma, and surrendering to their emotions.
In terms of surrendering to a partner’s path, although we desire for them to go on a specific personal journey that will be conducive to us and our well-being, we truly have no control over it, and will only hurt ourselves if we attempt to do so. The truth is, we all have a very unique and subjective path of self-discovery, full of hard moments, big failures, and lots of tears. But we each have to go down this path to discover what we both need to know to live in peace, but also to follow our karma and honor the road we incarnated on this plane to go down. With respect to one’s more emotional side of the self-discovery path, partners will be further ahead on the road at different times throughout their relationship. And when one is ahead, they must respect their partner’s pace.
This situation could manifest as a romantic partner losing a parent, which the other partner had gone through and overcome fairly recently. The person who overcame the loss before did it quite well and allowed themselves to feel the emotions to their fullest extent. Nevertheless, their partner is not as well equipped as them and finds themselves unable to move through the pain, stumbling in between deep repression and over-victimization. No matter what the healed partner attempts to say, their lover still finds themselves stuck in this rut. The right thing to do in this instance is to surrender to their pace and offer them loving support, without feeling the need to control their trajectory. This way, the struggling person can naturally find the lesson they need to learn, and have it land much harder for their system. As human beings, we need to be able to feel ourselves into a hard lesson, not be taught it, so we must honor this universal truth for our lovers. This truth is why the worst thing to possibly do is to get constantly frustrated with our partner’s process, try to control their emotions, and send hateful energy towards them for not going at the pace we did. (Apply this to any situation outside of grief that falls along the path of healing as well). Aside from damaging our partner, going about our lover’s personal path this way is devoid of any love, as love boils down to surrendering to wherever they are, not where you want them to be. Because if you only love someone for who you want them to be, then you don’t really love them, you love the illusion of them. Surrender, at its core, says, “I love you for exactly where you are and where you need to go.”
Next, for surrendering to a partner’s trauma, the process looks quite similar to the one above. The reason why surrendering to a lover’s trauma is so important, is that trauma shapes exactly who we are and the healing journey we will have to embark on in our lives. However, one key caveat exists here, we cannot surrender to someone’s trauma if they have not yet owned it and keep projecting its release onto us. These sorts of people, although not evil by any means, are not ready for real love and will make your relationship a shit show. As long as your partner is aware of what trauma is coming up in the present moment and not blaming you for its sudden release, surrendering to it is the best way to go. (Or, trying their best to do what they can to become aware of it). With regard to what this can look like, let’s say you forgot your phone in your locker at the gym and you miss your girlfriend’s calls for a couple of hours, which leads to their abandonment wound flying out. If your partner is honest with you and says, “You have done nothing wrong, but I am currently experiencing resurfacing emotions from when my dad said he would call and never did. I would really appreciate your loving support while I navigate this,” then you should immediately surrender to their experience and do whatever you can to support them through it. Although it requires radical ownership and excellent communication, the process of surrendering to each other’s trauma with honesty and support will make the love in a relationship grow as large as humanly possible, as well as the potential for communal healing.
Lastly, when it comes to surrendering to the emotions of a partner, it gets incredibly hard to feel loved if one is not truly seen for what they are feeling. Although we live in a world where people want to believe there are no differences between genders, this aspect of wanting to be seen for one’s feelings comes up more for women, which means that the masculine needs to get a whole lot better at dealing with it. When women are feeling emotional and talking about their problems, the last thing they want is for their partner to psychoanalyze them and tell them what they need to do to stop feeling that way. However, this is what men tend to do most of the time, as they refuse to feel their emotions and constantly override them with “logic,” transferring that habit to their partner in the process. Men must look past this habit they use for themselves and surrender to the emotion in front of them, making sure that their wife or girlfriend recognizes their empathy and feels fully supported to process their emotion somatically.
On the other hand, when it comes to men, they often just want space and peace when they are in an emotional rut. Rather than trying to “fix” them or feel as if the emotion is your fault and become defensive, sometimes loving space is all a man needs. Put differently, when a man needs to feel his negative emotions, understanding from the feminine can look like awareness that the man is going through something and not adding fuel to the fire. At their core, both examples of handling male and female emotions entail not trying to change, fix, or feel responsible for the emotion their partner is moving through, which requires surrendering to it as a strategy. (If you find yourself in a homosexual couple, replace man and woman with the more masculine partner and the more feminine partner).
While this section revealed how love as surrender takes form, the next one will go into what one can do psychologically to help them surrender automatically, rather than it feeling forced all the time.
HOW TO SURRENDER
Like most external skills in life, such as love and respect, you can only be truly good at them to the degree you are good at them with yourself. And in this case, in order to surrender to your lover effectively and properly, you must learn to surrender to yourself first. Using the same framework as the section above, how can you surrender to your path, trauma, and emotions? Once you learn to conquer all three, surrendering to yourself will be quite easy and that ease will project outwards more naturally. In terms of surrendering to your path, we each have a unique curriculum designed by the universe to teach us something that we need to know in this lifetime. Unfortunately, due to the fact that we are deeply stubborn people and only change ourselves when we get uncomfortable, we are often forced to deal with great pain and devastating situations. But these situations serve as beautiful vehicles for change, where we can realize where our ego may not be free and make the necessary adjustments to heal ourselves. For us to get to this place of using the discomfort as a vehicle for healing, we must surrender to wherever we are on our personal path and not anxiously desire to be somewhere else, as we know that the place we reside in is exactly where we need to be to learn what we need to know. The more we practice surrendering to wherever we are at and finding the silver lining, the more we will be able to do the same for our partner when they are facing severe discomfort. Furthermore, since we will know that we had to surrender to our pain to realize something important on our path, we will feel more inclined to not control or fix our partner when they are stuck on theirs, but rather, allow them to figure out their own way to freedom.
With regards to trauma, it’s almost impossible to have empathy and compassion for a partner who is going through resurfacing trauma if we do not allow ourselves to face ours as well. As someone who has healed a good chunk of their trauma, I can definitively say that the only way out is to feel your way out, requiring oneself to be with their resurfacing trauma lovingly and feel it all the way through. In other words, one must surrender to the painful sensations of their trauma resurfacing in order to heal. If one decides to go down this road, they will start to notice that their trauma has less power over them, as it is no longer coated in resistance and shame, but love instead. Since one can begin feeling the healing energy of surrendering to their trauma, they will likely extend that knowledge outward when their partner is processing theirs, since they know that their partner is healing themselves, and consequently, healing the relationship. Again, as stated earlier, this dynamic can only work if both partners are owning their trauma as theirs to deal with and not blaming it on their partner irrationally. However, if either side is consciously triggering their partner to gain power in some sort of way, then that’s a different story.
To bring it home, surrendering to your own emotions will make it easier to surrender to the emotions of your partner. If you are used to shaming your own emotions and shutting them down in order to keep your persona perfectly manicured, then you will have the same expectation of your partner. And their manicuring has nothing to do with them, but rather the idea of them you want them to be for you. When you begin to surrender to your emotions and listen to what they are telling you, you will realize that you are much more complicated and wounded than you think. Rather than trying to only be one tiny part of yourself, you will begin to realize that you have multiple identities within you surfacing in different moments, such as a hurt inner child or inner teen. Once these previously repressed emotional sides of yourself start to feel seen, you will feel a revamped sense of love enter your system. Since you will begin to feel more like yourself by feeling your emotions and understand that you are much more than just a well-crafted persona, you will no longer feel the need to control or change your partner when they are being emotional, as you want them to feel the love you feel when you fully witness and sit with your emotions.
The more we surrender to our path, our trauma, and our emotions, the more we will be able to do the same with our partner, entering a state of genuine love for their entirety, rather than just a perfect image of who we want them to be to satiate our ego. If you don’t believe in a higher power or the metaphysical, then move on to the next section. For the spiritual warriors who are still reading, I am going to list out the bonus work that will take your surrendering skills to the next level:
Although the three practices above will work wonders for your ability to surrender to yourself and your partner, the most powerful practice that will really move the needle is surrendering to God. However, I am not talking about a powerful man in the sky you should fear. To me, God is the loving energy that supports and feeds this dimension, but you can make God out to be whatever feels right in your heart. Once you begin surrendering to God, in the sense of believing that their energy is guiding you to exactly where you need to be, it will begin to be much easier to surrender to everything else. For some reason, and I can’t exactly pinpoint it, it feels like the more you surrender to God, the more you surrender to everything else around you. It’s as if God gives you back whatever you give them in terms of surrender.
LOVE AS RESPECT
One major part of the surrender argument that will be focused on here is that how can you expect to surrender to a lover without having the utmost respect for them? For instance, how can you surrender to their resurfacing trauma or their negative emotions if you have no respect for them? Without complete respect, facing these situations with a romantic partner will easily turn into a bullying session of criticizing their process and labeling them with hurtful words. Since respect is required in order to surrender to a partner and fully experience the beauty that is love, how can we go about respecting our other half? First and foremost, one needs to respect their partner as a free individual who exists as a whole, sovereign ecosystem without them. All respect goes out the window when we begin to believe that our partner belongs to us or is our property in any way. Although “property” may suggest a crazy husband locking their wife in the house all the time, I more so mean any sentiment that is rooted in absolute control, as that implies that you view the person you are trying to control as your property. This need for control, which leads to behaviors of treating a partner like property, is rooted in the fear of losing them as a romantic partner. If we live in fear of losing the person we love, and do everything we can to stop that, then we end up losing respect for them, as we begin to see them as someone who is unable to make decisions about their own lives. I truly do believe that a large chunk of respect for a lover boils down to losing this constant fear of losing them and wishing them nothing but happiness if they ever choose to move on from the relationship.
Once you begin respecting your partner as a free, sovereign individual, it will be much easier to go into the next stages that are required for complete respect: accepting any choice a partner feels the need to make for themselves, allowing them to grow into the person they need to be, feeling that who they are and what they do is deeply important for this world, and showing all of that on a consistent basis through verbal affirmations and loving actions.
When we are in a couple, we often think that any decision our partner makes should be our decision too. While that is true for the most part, such as big decisions about children or a living location, we can get in the bad habit of micromanaging all our partner’s decisions. This tyrannical behavior can look like demanding that our partner stop hanging out with a certain friend, quit their job, stop eating a certain food, or stop making medical decisions for themselves. I saw the last item on this list ruin many relationships when one partner decided to get or not get the COVID vaccination. The reason they got ruined is that their freedom to make an incredibly important choice—the freedom to choose what goes into or doesn’t go into their body—was completely ignored. Once one side of the relationship feels like their partner does not respect them enough to make decisions for themselves, it becomes harder and harder to love them, as their love will begin to feel like a prison, rather than an ever-expanding web of blissful freedom. So, next time your partner is making a decision that may not sit well with your ego, check in with them and truly understand why they are doing so. Once you understand, let go of that need for control and use the respect you have for them as a sovereign individual to take over the tyrant within. If the decision is genuinely a dealbreaker for you and you can’t understand it all, then you are free to leave the relationship, which is a better option than just controlling them into somebody you wish for them to be all the time, leaving both sides perpetually miserable throughout the relationship.
Next, concerning the allowance of a partner to grow into the person they need to be, we must begin by understanding that when we sign the contract of loving someone, we are also agreeing to love the person they will transform into over and over again, which may go against our expectation of how we would like them to be. Reflective of the argument made earlier in this article, each person has their own unique path in life, which we have absolutely no control over. The more we try and combat this inevitable character arch of our partner, the more we will fall out of love and find ourselves in a constant state of resistance. To truly burn down any resistance we may possess to the personality change of our partner, we must learn to bathe in respect for them and their process. Once we respect that they know what’s best for them and are also being guided by a higher power to figure out what’s best for them, it becomes a lot easier to let go and surrender into love. Again, if who they are becoming is truly not synchronizing with you, then you are free to let go of them, which may be a better option than fighting their right to change as a person all the time.
Penultimately, when it comes to feeling that who your partner is and the work they do is important for the world, this is the component where respect simultaneously is the most needed and becomes the most powerful. To arrive at a state where we believe this importance, it requires that we achieve the highest level of respect for our partner: that they are worthy of the utmost admiration. At its core, the word “admire” basically translates to respect on steroids. And to genuinely believe that our partner is special to this world, we must respect the shit out of them. Once we massively respect our partner, it becomes easier to believe that who they are is needed for the world, as we feel that having them in our lives is making it so much better, thus whoever else encounters them on their personal journey is very lucky. For example, since I believe my girlfriend is such an incredible person and have extreme respect for her, I feel in my heart that anyone who crosses paths with her is not only lucky, but blessed to receive her healing energy. Once you start feeling this way about your partner, you will have officially mastered the class of how to respect your partner.
Lastly, with regards to communication, what good is all of this knowledge if your partner doesn’t see it put to work and feel the power of your respectful language? Without putting the pen to paper, it all goes to shit. So, let’s begin with respecting our partner’s decision-making abilities. To communicate this, whenever they are worried about a tough choice they have to make, not only send your warm, loving energy their way for support, but also verbalize how much you trust their decision-making and how you deeply respect the choice they made. (Please don’t force this. If a partner’s decision really goes against everything you stand for, then don’t skip the conflict that’s required to come to a mutual understanding). Moving down the list, for letting our person grow into the person they need to be for themselves, simply put, you just have to make them feel loved and respected for who they are becoming. For instance, telling them how much you love the person they are growing into will go a long way, as well as communicating how proud you are of them for taking the healing journey. And finally, make your partner feel that you believe that who they are is needed for the world and the work they do is also required for the world to be a good place. To do so, you can often say something along the lines of, “I’m so happy that your coworkers get to experience the wonderful person you are. And your company is so lucky to have your awesome ideas running through its corporate consciousness.”
