One thing my mother never told me growing up is that in most situations we face as adults, love isn't enough to keep a relationship going. As children we are spoon fed fairy tale after fairy tale about how love conquers all and if you love someone just enough, you will never lose. This is a load of bunk.
The truth is over 50% of marriages end, but most, not for lack of love on one or both parties. Sadly enough, love isn't enough to keep a relationship going strong. No matter how much you love someone, if they don't love you back, you won't win. If you love someone and they fall in love with someone else, your love won't bring them back. If you have a million other things testing the strength of your companionship and the two of you can't figure out a way to successfully cope and move forward as a team, love will not be enough to carry you through. That's life. Sad, depressing and glum, but real life.
People fall in and out of love for a million reasons...the most common I believe is that most people don't really know the meaning of love to begin with. They say they love you, but do they truly know what being in love with someone means? As a parent, I can firmly say, yes I know exactly what love means. If I don't love someone with as much depth, conviction, sacrifice and clarity as I love my children, then I don't truly love them and if based solely off that definition I can honestly say I've probably only been in love, true love, once. in my entire life (minus the two times I fell head over heels in love with my children).
Often times most adults confuse sex with love. Hell, most teenagers do it too and just carry that definition on with them into adulthood. The problem allot of women have is that they equate love with sex. "If he sleeps with me, he must love me". And truth be told there is a very large population of men out there who believe the exact same thing, but none of it is true. I believe that human beings are just naturally trained to only see what they want to see and hear. We train our eyes to only see the positives of a relationship, we train our ears to only hear what we want to hear from our partners and we dilute and mold everything else to fit into the perfect representation of what it is we want from our partners which inevitably leads to an excessive amount of disappointment in the end. But the truth of the matter is sex doesn't equal love. Many people have sex for many reasons other than love. Curiosity, the excitement of the conquest, mutual animal attraction or even out of sheer boredom, but rarely is it ever about love. And I think that if we can teach our daughters the difference between sex and love, then when we send them out into the world they can be that much more prepared for the shit storm heading their way.
But back to the topic at hand, love. Ironically enough you can love someone with every ounce of your being and it still isn't going to pay your rent, or help you deal with the day to day trials and tribulations of raising a child with severe disabilities, or overcome an infidelity. People are stupid by nature. We crack under pressure and we make mistakes, and for some ridiculous reason we are taught from birth that all of lives woos are somehow going to magically be solved so long as we have someone by our side to help us get through it. Well what if that person holding your hand through life is the cause of your woos? Then what?
"Maybe you two weren't meant to be together in the first place." "Well the heart wants what the heart wants." and "You can't choose who you fall in love with." Well I say yes the hell you can. I believe those couples you see walking down the street hold hands, thirty five years into a monogamous relationship didn't just happen to stubble upon each other by some unseen karmic force and poof they were in love. They've been together for thirty five years because they are in love, truly in love and they made it work. They made love more than enough to last that long. And that is the problem most relationships have today. Someone or neither party is in love..not true love.
You can love the way someone makes you feel, the way they are in bed, the way they cook and clean the house, they way they make you smile at the thought of them when they are away, but is that true love? If it came down to it would you give up your life for them? Would you take a bullet for them, would you give up your existence so they could go on? If they were gone tomorrow could you honestly ever get over the loss? Could be carry a burden for them for a week, a month, 10 years, the rest of their life if you had to? That is true love. And most people today will never experience it a day in their lives. When money gets tight, when a loved one dies or becomes ill long term, when life in general gets hard can you depend on your partner to hold down the fort and hold you up the same as you would do for them? If you have even an ounce of doubt then someone is not in love.
I came across this very topic in recent weeks when my 12 year old had and lost her first boyfriend. (disclaimer: I do not approve of her dating so young, so we (his parents and myself) did it old school and supervised the children 24/7). In the aftermath she is still crying because he claimed he loved her, but not even a day after they broke up he was claiming to be in love with someone else. I had to explain to her to that this in fact was not love at all, but in fact a high school infatuation and reassure her that boys will come and go and that true love could quite possibly be awaiting her around the corner (hopefully 10 years down the road if I had my way). But in dealing with this and helping her through it I realized that even as an adult I've noticed the men I've dated have thrown the "l" word around quite a bit and for all intensive purposes most of them more than likely didn't mean it.
It brought me back to my most recent relationship, now having ended about a year and a half ago I can understand where my 12 year old is coming from. I loved him, he fell in love with someone else. Or so it would appear on the surface. Coming out of that relationship I tell my daughter that I didn't walk out of it because I didn't love him. I left because I realized that he never really loved me and I deserve to be loved as much as the right man deserves my love. It took me two and half years to realize that the man I was intending to marry didn't really love me. He loved my money. He loved that I gave him a place to lay his head at night. He loved that I put food in his stomach on a daily basis. Hell for all intensive purposes he could've been a dog. But that's what we as adults deal with all in the name of love. When I got hurt and couldn't work and the bank account slowly depleted his love for me slowly became less and less. And at some point in time he began to profess his love for another woman who had all the things I no longer did, a job, a home, extra spending money to support his habits and a car. I was being used and he was using 'love' to convince me that I wanted to put up with him.
It is rarely so cut and dry for most relationships thought. Most couples can say they are in love, but let the comfy lifestyle you two have built up for yourselves come to screeching halt and then and only then will you ever truly be able to see just how much love really did play in the entire relationship.
Not to sound bitter, but more times than not, love is not enough. Saying you love someone is not enough to keep you strong through hard times. Proving that you are truly there for someone through thick and thin, being the rock when your partner stumbles and taking care of one another, that's true love. And only true love is ever enough.
So I tell my daughter that even though her ex told her he loved her, he in fact did not. Its a harsh reality to hear, but she needs to hear it. Did she truly love him? Probably not. But are her feelings invalid because of it? Not at all. You can care about someone deeply, and when they're gone you can miss their company. You can miss the routine you two set up as a couple. But the truth is if they truly loved you the two of you would still be together. I left my ex because I realized the love I felt was only coming from my side of the equation. Did it hurt like hell to do it? Of course it did. I truly loved him. I still love him, but my love wasn't enough for the both of us and it took more courage to walk away, say 'have a nice life, I wish you the best' and truly mean every word of it. But in all honesty, if he'd loved me back, he never would've let me go.
