WE LOVE THE ONES THAT CAN'T
the fog is thick on the city tonight. i’m driving back from the west side of seattle and it's difficult to see even the car ahead of me save for its periodic brakelights and sometimes-highbeams as it rounds a slow corner back to wherever it will be parked for the rest of the evening. the roads are metallic white, mist resolving itself on charcoal-grey highway and bouncing sharp light up through my windshield from LED streetlamps and cars approaching; now passing. my hands are the hurt kind of cold. i hear this through paper speaker cones:
“see those headlights coming towards us;
that's someone going back
to a town they said they'd never, yeah, they swore it on their life”
brianna wiest wrote something again. i read it about two hours ago and i’ve read it four times since. you're going to read it in a few seconds too. it is the most concise and plainly stated piece of writing on the purpose of love that i have ever heard. not on what love is (there's plenty of writing on that) but on what it is for. what it’s supposed to do. what it will do if you let it. what it will do if you don't let it.
“claro que si”
the following post definitely doesn’t propose an easy understanding of the reason for relationships. particularly not for the ones that end. in fact, there are parts that are so abstract compared to what most of us have been taught that bits of it border on being offensive. not what’s written but what it represents to our hearts. to our selves. it’s a peculiar thing how we process the hard stuff. and this? this post? this is the hardest way to do love. this model makes zero concessions by putting us on blast and spotlighting our shortcomings and poking right into the bruises we’ve been carrying (and covering) our whole lives. then it begs us to stop refracting and start absorbing. to strip ourselves bare, stare at ourselves in a mirror, and come to terms with the reasons we choose to love people who cannot love us back.
and then love ourselves in those same ways.
i’ll let brianna say this better than me. she absolutely does. there is not a single word that I would change about what is written below. every line and phrase of this piece is, for me, the verity of love.
it’s tempting to throw the game and settle for something mediocre or safe. someone that would lay down and push over. that won't challenge me or stand up to me or confidently have an opinion different than mine. parts of that sound nice. i certainly wouldn't need to worry about casualties, many of which i've caused myself, some of which have been recent. but that feels like fear and this is the year to be brave. we have one month left to go. so tonight the most self-reliant, sovereign, courageous thing i can do is keep driving through the fog until i arrive. and i’m not going to be modest about this. i can’t afford to be. instead i’m white-knuckling this wheel until i turn a corner of my own. until until i’m home, where my hands will be warmer than they are right now.
The Very Important Reason Why We Choose To Love People Who Cannot Love Us Back
BY BRIANNA WIEST
The purpose of a relationship is not to be loved perfectly, or forever. It is not to have our every whim and wish met and fulfilled. It is not to be completed, or to have our minds and hearts fueled by the hormonal stimulation we think is the feeling of love. The purpose of a relationship is not the Universe’s way of saying “you’re worthy, and here’s someone to prove it.”
The purpose of a relationship is to see ourselves completely. It is to see the parts of ourselves that we are otherwise unconscious of. The purpose of a relationship is to infuriate and overjoy and destroy us, so we can see what angers us, what thrills us, and where we need to give ourselves love. The purpose of a relationship is not to fix us, or heal us, or to make us whole and happy, it is to show us where we need fixing, and what parts of us are still broken, and perhaps the most brutal of all: that nobody can do this work, or make us happy, but ourselves.
We choose to love people who cannot love us back to teach ourselves that we are, in fact, worthy of being loved back. We choose these people because they represent the parts of us that we don’t love – why else would we waste our time on people who don’t return our affection? We choose to love these people because they are the only ones with whom we share an intimate connection deep enough that it can awaken and illuminate the darkest corners of ourselves, and they are the only ones who can leave and let us do what we are here to do: resolve and actualize and heal them on our own.
It is not the nature of love that people struggle with, but what it is designed to do. Most of our turmoil simply comes from never having been told that love will keep breaking our hearts until they open, and that we will be the ones throwing ourselves in again and again.
Our life partners are the people who come after the love that opens us. Our big loves are the loves that emerge after we think we’ve lost them already. They come after we’re ready, after we’ve already cleared out the damage and debris, only after we’ve learned what it means to love ourselves. It is in this we realize that love is sharing what we already have, not relying on someone else to give us something to supplement. It is in this we realize how crucial it was to love the people who could not love us back. They were never meant to, and the rest only depends on how long it takes us to realize this.
you can find more of brianna’s work by following the direct link to this article:
http://soulanatomy.org/the-very-important-reason-why-we-choose-to-love-people-who-cannot-love-us-back/
