People use the word love too broadly. I think the intention is usually good but it creates confusion and opportunities for deception; both against others and ourselves. In a recent exchange with one of my relatives she said she chooses to love people. I found this comment condescending because the implication was that I do not choose to love and choosing to love made her a better person. I thought about it and decided I don’t choose to love. It just happens. It made me think about if it is even possible to choose to love or if she is using the word love in place of a more appropriate word or if she was being deceptive with me or deceptive with herself.
It seems most people feel genuine love at some point in their lives- not all, but most. Those who have felt it know love overwhelms us. It sneaks up on us and slaps us in the face. It makes us do things we wouldn’t do when not under its influence. It alters our thinking and can leave us hungover and aching. Sometimes it simmers over a long period of time until we see a long-term acquaintance as something more. When our love is unrequited, it can be very painful and give us the opportunity to learn about ourselves. We can also learn a lot about ourselves when we are loved but do not feel love in return. Secret love can be thrilling and heartbreaking. Love can help us see beauty where we previously saw none. It can inspire. It can also depress. We can’t predict when love will rise in us and when it will fail to show up. Love cannot, no matter how much we may want it, be manufactured.
I have used the word love too loosely. I’ve said I love a food, a movie, a song, a class, or an experience that, in reality, I just really enjoyed. I have truly loved as well. The way I feel about blackberries or a quality gravy (not together) goes beyond normal enjoyment. The excitement I feel knowing I will get one of them and the satisfaction I feel when the first bite hits my tongue brings a giddy joy that feels fueled by love. Both tastes are connected to fond childhood memories. I remember being the small kid who could crawl inside wild blackberry bushes and get the juicy berries others couldn’t reach. Every time I make a yummy turkey gravy I remember my grandpa making the gravy right before thanksgiving dinner was served. Is true love of a food possible? I can’t control the way I feel about these foods. No bad experience with extra seedy berries or burnt gravy has been able to subdue my love for them. The love I feel for things seems to be connected to love I have for people. Blackberry picking surrounded my mom and her family. My grandpa is connected to gravy. I also feel a strange connection to the 1993 movie My Life starring Michael Keaton that I can only describe as love. It brings tears to my eyes thinking about it. It is connected to my deep love for my children and my intense fear of not being around to protect them. I watched My Life repeatedly during my first pregnancy and cried every time. My husband thought I should quit watching it but I liked that it focused my pregnancy emotions on the movie instead of my real life problems, like my love for him. My love for my husband has kept me from leaving when I should have. I accepted poor treatment from him that I would never have tolerated from someone I didn’t love. As I think about the people I love I feel a warmth well up inside me, even for those who have hurt me. Love causes a physical reaction. It is difficult to describe. It is a connection to a person that survives disagreement, abuse and injury. It is a connection that motivates negotiation, change and healing. When love is one sided it can cause great harm. When abused, a lover must go to great lengths to separate from the abuser they love and put a lot of energy into maintaining that separation. It feels like trying to leave a piece of yourself behind. The connection is sometimes never fully gone. It lurks around every corner ready to rear up and consume you. Love is a wild beast that cannot be broken or controlled. We are at the mercy of its desires and can only control our reaction to being consumed by it.
It was confusing for me growing up hearing that I was supposed to love my neighbor. It was often coupled with “do unto other as you would have them do unto you.” The two were pretty much inseparable. My heart snuggles them together in a warm fuzzy blanket of Jesus is a gentle free love hippie and therefore his followers should be too. But my experience has taught me that warm fuzzy idea is insanely wrong. At the same time that love-thy-neighbor and do-unto-others was being imbedded in my brain I watched most of the Christian adults in my life treat people like shit. It has not improved as I got older. The reasons they give for treating others poorly have changed. A woman showing a millimeter of cleavage is no longer a good excuse. Now, it’s a transwoman using the woman’s restroom. Somehow “love” for thy neighbor is still being taught by people spreading intense hatred of their neighbor. The message of “love” has not changed because it was faulty from the beginning. We cannot control if we feel love for our neighbor. The “love” I was taught as a child is artificial. When the love is artificial it lacks the wild power of love. It lacks the overwhelming need to care for those we love. It lacks the forgiveness love brings forth within us. It lacks the ability to empathize with those who lead lives different from our own. The more dangerous element of artificial love is it creates an artificial sense of satisfaction for the person wielding it. A person who claims to love a person they do not, can make justifications for the abuse they inflict on the person they claim to love. They inflict pain out of “love.” People who abuse their children and spouses often claim it is because they “love” them. In reality, they abuse because they crave control. If it were real love they would want their loved ones to find their own happiness even if it isn’t what they want them to choose. The artificial love I was taught as a child is about hiding behind the power of love and using it to try to gain control.
People have a natural desire to be in control. It makes us feel safer when we can predict what is going to happen. Any challenge to that predictability triggers a desire for tighter control. When those who are leaning on artificial love are challenged they do not have the warmth of love to cushion their desire for control. They can harm their challenger. Some do it with physical abuse. Some do it by making rules that are intended to harm. If a child challenges a parent’s curfew by sneaking out of the house, a parent who is acting from an artificial love for their child may lock the child in their room and anchor the windows shut with screws, disregarding the clear danger they are creating for the child. A parent that is acting from real love for their child will think about the child's safety and be able to empathize with the child’s desires and negotiate a solution. When the child continues to challenge, a loving parent can see through their own frustrations to appreciate their child’s persistence as a useful trait in adulthood. A parent’s love for their child is the easy example. The challenges are constant and real love often easily takes over. If you are parenting without real love (it does happen and you can’t help it if you don’t have real love for your child) you can seek help to keep your desire to control from harming your child. (Side note: If you think you might lack real love for your child please look into narcissism. Someday I’m going to write about my love for narcissists. They are human beings -not worthless people, as many people like to classify them. Dealing with narcissism does require the person with narcissism to seek change on their own. Loving a narcissist will not “fix” them. If you have a narcissist parent or find yourself in love with a narcissist and you have negative thoughts about yourself, please seek help. Help for how you feel, not to try to get the narcissist to treat you better.) The age-old battle for control between parent and child without a real love connection can be extremely difficult.
Pretending to love causes more problems than it solves. Because of the lack of attachment through a familial connection, the more sinister use of artificial love is in the treatment of those considered an Other. In my correspondence with my relative I felt she was being condescending to me when she said she chooses to love. It inspired me to explore the idea of love in this blog. After sending her an announcement of my child’s graduation she tried to reconnect with me through a letter. (It was an actual letter sent through the mail. I have enjoyed the slow process using the mail has provided. Instead of the rapid fire nature of social media.) I responded to her attempt to reconnect with a letter explaining why her political actions prevent me from having a relationship with her. In my letter I spoke of the hate being legislated against people, like my child, who identify within the LGBTQIA community. This hate is rooted in seeing people as an Other. I mentioned real life consequences with schooling, housing, and employment. I also alerted her to the issue of anti-trans rhetoric causing an increase in the murder of transgender people. She did not address my concerns in her response. She instead informed me she despises conditional love (she included the underline), chooses to love those her hurt her and said it’s okay if we disagree on topics. She also said she would never force her thoughts and beliefs on me or my family. However, that is exactly what she is doing with her vote. It seems to me she wants to passive-aggressively force her beliefs on my family through laws so she doesn’t have to listen to a dissenting opinion. I wasn’t surprised that she did not take responsibility for the consequences of her actions in the voting booth and tried to gaslight me into believing even discussing how to vote destroys freedom. Instead of seeking a pointless shallow relationship with someone whose actions harm my child, I focused on expressing myself with a piece for my Word Therapy series and writing this blog post.
Murder, 2021
5 3/4" x 8 1/2"
This is my Word Therapy piece inspired by my correspondence with my relative. I alternated quotes from the letter she wrote to me with quotes from the letter I wrote to her. When starting a Word Therapy I think about the topic I need to vent. Then I write down a list of words or phrases that linger in my brain. Sometimes they are quotes and sometimes they are just words that I associate with the topic. Sometimes I play with the order. For this piece I chose to alternate our quotes writing one then turning the paper upside down and writing the other as if it is mirroring the first. I repeat the phrases over and over until the page is full. Sometimes I play with the size of the writing. Sometimes I use words to create a border. In this piece I chose to surround the initial set of quotes with the ones I found most important. Placing these words around the others highlights the critical difference in the way we classify the importance of political responsibility. The piece is called Murder because in my letter to her I mentioned the increase in murders of transgender people. The horrible treatment of transgender people was the most important thing I wrote about to her. She dismissed my serious concerns as a minor topic on which we could casually disagree. Her disregard for my child’s well being upset me. Instead of investing time in a fruitless discussion with her I spent hours tracing and melding our quotes into a web of lines and curves. The words disappeared into the ink with the exception of moments in the border. The border anchors our lack of clarity with a frame of our most disconnected statements.
Above is the back of Murder. I have never shared the back of a Word Therapy piece publicly before. Because the words on the front tend to become unreadable, I also write them on the back. It is a reminder to myself of where the piece began. I like to keep most of these lists private because they are too revealing. I am sharing this one because I thought Murder would be a good opportunity to reveal more of my process. Below is a detail of the Murder in progress. It didn’t occur to me take a picture before I started transforming the words but this gives some idea of what it looks like in the beginning.
We don’t choose to love someone who has hurt us. We love someone even though they have hurt us. The injury doesn’t negate the love. We feel the sadness or anger caused by the injury simultaneously with the love. The love often makes sadness and anger deeper. I think this is because we feel less equipped to respond. It is much more difficult to protect ourselves from the abuse caused by those we love. Having to put effort into “loving” someone who hurts you either means the love was never real or the real love is gone. It cannot be forced. We can learn to love someone but not in the way we learn math or science. We can develop feelings of love over time. We can feel love for someone we’ve known for a long time but did not previously love. Learning more and more about who they are and how they exist in the world can cause us to fall in love with them. It is the slow simmer version of love. Unfortunately sometimes it never happens no matter how much time and effort we invest. It doesn’t happen because we cannot manufacture love. It is wild. It grows where it chooses and lacks predictability.
I feel love for my relative who inspired this blog post. It isn’t the exciting love that inspires people to stay in abusive relationships. It’s the kind of love that increases disappointment but leaves hope that someday that person will see the damage caused by their actions. I have relatives I do not love. Religion tried to sell me on the idea that it is heresy to not love a close relative. But I can’t help not feeling love for them. I could lie and say I love them but I’d rather be accused of committing heresy than lie. When a relative I do not love does the same horrible things as the relatives I love it is easy to dismiss the relationship as a waste of my time. I don’t have the fuel of love or the obligation of religion to pursue a common ground with them. It may be a lost opportunity to bridge a gap but the lack of love for them drains my motivation.
We can have quality relationships without love. We can treat people we do not love with kindness and respect. It takes more effort. It requires communication and a wiliness to negotiate. People who sell the idea of choosing to love often skip over the hard work required to genuinely treat people with kindness and respect. It isn’t something we can just turn on. It isn’t something we can manifest without understanding the person’s challenges. We can be a good parent without love. We can be in a quality romantic relationship without love. Both require more effort to avoid causing harm because these situations will likely not have the instinct to protect that love provides.
The group I find most irritating are the artificial love radiators. They want others to believe they emit love for all and have no ill feelings toward anyone. I believe some people actually do easily feel true feelings of love for a lot of people but they are extremely rare and it is not by choice. Most of the people claiming to love all people are pushing an agenda. They are a selling themselves as a higher form of person. They are often selling religion or a purchasable product as well. These people are the most dangerous of the choose to “love” crowd. They are manipulators who are using others to lift themselves up either for spiritual credit or financial gain or both. They set an impossible standard. They do not care about the people they claim to love. They do not even try to understand the issues that the people they claim to love face. They have shallow relationships because knowing the details of people’s lives is more work. They claim to love someone then act in ways that harm that person without putting any effort into understanding the impact of their actions. They claim their actions have higher meaning but in reality their actions are self-centered. Plenty of people are self-centered but the ones who couple self-centeredness with claims of choosing “love” cause the most harm. It is gaslighting. The person presents their ability to choose “love” as the norm and they devalue those who are open about their normal complicated feelings. They will try to convince others that they too can choose “love” if they are just willing to put in the effort or commitment. In reality, dealing with complicated feelings is more work than pretending to love others. Being aware of a variety of feelings requires maintaining multiple details about different people. The gaslighting “love” chooser often assumes everyone has the same experiences and responds the same way to situations, using their own experiences and responses as the template. It is easy to see through simple observation that we don’t all have the same experiences or respond the same way. But when faced with a gaslighter it can be difficult to see past their simplistic statements because most people want them to be true. The gaslighter is condescending and attempts to make others feel mentally inadequate to figure out how they feel for themselves.
The other group of artificial love promoters are less sinister. I think they have mislabeled investing in people as love. When they say they choose to “love” others they mean they are choosing to try to understand and be kind to people they don’t naturally love. It is a nice thing to do but it creates confusion. Labeling this activity as love waters down the term and can make people feel like they should be able to control the wildness of love. It can make people feel inadequate in their relationships. It can make people feel like they care more about their partner than their partner does about them. If one person feels raw wild love and the other is choosing to “love” then they are bringing two very different things to the relationship. They are unaware that they are speaking different languages. Couples spend years trying to figure out why they can’t communicate when it is simple. One person is acting on an emotion that can overwhelm them and the other is making a conscious choice that requires rational actions. Outside of intimate relationships, investing in people, trying to understand them, choosing to be kind, compassionate, and respectful are wonderful actions that provide a safer more equitable society; but it is not love. It can lead to love. It can open a person up to find love in unexpected places. But the act of choosing to be nice to others is not the same thing as love. Claiming they are the same thing oversimplifies what it takes to find the motivation to be kind to those we do not love; especially when they have not been kind to you. It gives people who don’t want to do the real work required to understand other people’s experiences a simple but powerful word to hide behind. The power of the word love is born wild real love. Stating that you choose to “love” requires no evidence of action because real love is so powerful. Love is internal. It is mysterious. It cannot be proven or disproven. Investing in people and being kind requires action. Kindness is seen and felt by others. The two are not the same and should not use the same name.
When I say I love a person it means something important to me. I don’t throw it around as a way to promote myself or an agenda. It is personal. I can’t prove it nor do I want to. It is something I can’t control. It is something I don’t want to control. I have been caught off guard by love. Love has also shown up where I expected it but then it still overwhelmed me with its intensity. My love has faded for people I was told it shouldn’t. It has gotten me in and out of trouble. It has hurt me. It has saved me. I understand why people have the desire to harness love and ride it through life. But even if I had the choice I don’t think I would tame love. I like the adrenaline surge when it catches me off guard triggering my fight or flight response. I like the warmth that wells up in me when it comforts me with cuddles. Love’s wild nature keeps our lives interesting. Learning to live with it and learning to live without it both give us the opportunity to be better people.
If we quit using the word love so broadly and use more appropriate words it will make it easy to communicate about love, kindness and understanding. It will decrease confusion and defuse a weapon of those who want to manipulate others. Please don’t choose “love.” You can choose kindness. You can choose understanding. You can choose to treat people well. But love is a wild beast that has to choose you.
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