Aoife Henry

Let’s talk about love.

In her book, ‘All About Love‘, bell hook’s defines love as: “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. My interpretation of this is that love is simultaneously a fuzzy feeling, a more concrete intention and a tangible act of service you do for yourself or another. I want to highlight three particular features of love:

1. that it is found between people at every time-scale: between siblings of a lifetime, friends of years, lovers of months, sometimes even strangers of minutes on a train.
2. that is dynamic: love can bubble and gush between new acquaintances, it can shape-shift from one form to another after a single intimate event, it can rapidly disintegrate following a breach in trust.
3. that it is an intensely vulnerable thing to openly, honestly and unreservedly love someone, to love them completely.

I want to dwell on that last one. By ‘open’, I mean that you unambiguously express how much you love that person to them and perhaps even to others. By ‘honest’, I mean that you are completely honest with yourself and  the person about how you feel about them, that you don’t try to quench the feelings, to muddy your intentions or to abate the acts of service you conduct to show this love. And finally, by ‘unreservedly’, I mean that you don’t hold your love back. You don’t try to play it cool, and you don’t filter how you feel or the ways you want to express it for fear they will be rejected. This is a tall order. Loving someone like this is vulnerable, because you are allowing yourself to form an attachment to the current state of the relationship you share with this person – and as per feature 2) above, this state will change. You may become closer, you may also become more distant. You may more or less physically or emotionally intimate. Your values may more closely align or cease to align. Your needs and wants in your relationships may change. The emotional, physical and mental state of each individual may change, accordingly influencing the connection betwixt them.

And so, by loving, we are emotionally attaching to something potentially transient and uncertain. With each transition, we may lose some aspect of the previous state with which we were so infatuated. We may need to grieve this loss. When we choose to love completely, we are vulnerable to loss of that which we choose to love and the grief left in its wake.

Some transitions to new relationship states, like breakups, result in more loss and are harder to adapt to than others, and thus necessitate a more intensive and slower grieving process. Other transitions, like an escalation in intimacy, can feel jarring and confusing as you try to sort through and untangle a medley of new emotions towards the person and uncertainties regarding your relationship to them. A temporary separation can feel like an abrupt transition as you flounder to fill the needs left unmet without this person’s presence, and to figure out how to act out your love for them by other means.

As singer Paloma Faith so succinctly put: “Only love can hurt like this“. Whether you’re doing it right or wrong, whether it’s flourishing or dying, complete love between two people will undergo transitions, and those transitions might hurt. And that’s okay. It’s a vulnerability I’m more than willing to expose, and I hope you are too.