Through my adventures and misadventures with romantic relationships, intimate friendships, polyamory, and bisexuality – I, along with a distributed squad of instructive authors I wish I were friends with, have developed, and continue to develop, my own guidebook of sorts on how to love people honestly and ethically. Until now it has been a mental guidebook. This blog post is my attempt to document my most up-to-date draft on the topic.
transparency and consent
In that order. You must be honest with your partner about what you expect from them, what they should or shouldn’t expect from you, how you feel, what’s going on in your life, and what your concerns are. You need consent from them to engage in relationship with you in any way, and true consent is not possible without true transparency.
you will F**k up. And that’s okay.
When we try to breach the boundaries of our love comfort zone – by loving new people, by being vulnerable in expressing that love, by being honest – we enter uncharted territory. While we can do our research and make enquiries as to the rules of this new game – we probably don’t know for certain what the safe moves are, and even if we do, they are new moves, so we may forget. We are human. Expect to make mistakes, forgive yourself when you do, and forgive your partners their blunders too.
attempt the impossible feat of knowing your partner and fulfilling their needs.
You don’t need to read their soul, but you do need to try to understand them, their trauma, pain, feelings, confusions, frustrations, desires, jealousies, fears, hopes, and dreams. It may well be that they don’t have the words to explain them to you, in which case you just need to express your desire to understand, and sit with them while they try to understand themselves. There will be parts of them you can’t understand, the important thing is your willingness to try. Similarly, you cannot meet all of their needs, but you can show that you wish for their needs to be met. You can facilitate them to meet some of them, and support them in their efforts to meet the others.
affirm.
In their book, ‘All About Love’, the author bell hooks urges us that “love is as love does”. I take this to mean that loving is an action, not a throwaway catch-phrase you can toss someone’s way and be done with. If you love someone, make it known again, and again, and again. Don’t just tell them you love them, tell them why, make romantic gestures that show them your love, make them feel seen and heard, hold them like you never want to let them go. If you feel a sentiment of appreciation for them, it would be a tragedy to keep it to yourself. Make them feel your love. If this feels like effort, maybe this relationship is not working for either of you.
Be honest with yourself.
Just because you can’t find a reason not to love someone, doesn’t obligate you to love them. If you don’t feel an attachment to somebody, you do them and yourself a disservice to pretend to love them. In her (sometimes frighteningly relatable) memoir, ‘Everything I Know About Love’, Dolly Alderton writes:
If you think you want to break up with someone, but practical matters are getting in the way, this is the test: imagine you could go into a room and press a big red button that would end your relationship with no fuss. No break‐up conversations, no tears, no picking up your things from his house. Would you do it? If the answer is yes, you have to break up with them.
It will hurt you, it will hurt them, but in time you will both be better off, and there is nothing wrong with you for acting on your truth.
The practise of love is the practise of resilience.
Love can feel like a battlefield sometimes. One day you’re infatuated with someone, the next they can’t stand to be in the same room as you and you can’t imagine that you were ever close to them. As I’ve written about in the third section of this blog post, some devastating consequences of a break-up are that a) you think of yourself as unworthy of love, and b) you become afraid to extend your love to another. Take all the time you need to grieve, but please do not take time out from love. Love yourself in all of your beautiful, lovely, imperfect glory. Spend time with people who remind you of this if you must. Love them too. Tell others in your life how much you appreciate them. You, my friend, are hot property, and don’t you forget that for a second. The more we practise loving ourselves and loving others, the more resilient to the dissolution of love we become.
What have you learned about love? x A
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