Aoife Henry

all you need for love

To love someone, in my continuously evolving view, is a) to want to understand them, b) to want to facilitate them to meet their needs and c) to want to play with them. Let’s break that down:

understanding

Firstly, we acknowledge that you cannot fully understand this turbulent, chaotic ocean of a person: their trauma and their wounds, their conditioning and the culture they have come from, their love languages and their communication style, their aspirations and their fears, what tickles them, what stings them, what aggravates them, or what they consider a win or a loss. Secondly, we express in our words and our actions that, despite this limitation, we want to try to understand this person, insofar as they want to teach us how to understand them, or alternatively, that we want to metaphorically sit with them and hold their hand while they try to understand their own ocean. We hold them and let them talk it out, cry it out, feel it out, and and we try to understand what they want us to understand.

needs

Similarly, we firstly acknowledge that we are incapable of fulfilling all of the needs of this person. Our noble pursuit to fill their needs are irrefutably limited by our emotional, mental and physical faculties, our skills, our understanding of the need, our background and our interests. But again, if we love this person, we express to them that, despite this limitation, we want to facilitate them to fill their needs in whatever way we are capable of doing. We let go of our egos and support them unequivocally to do what they need to do to feel okay as long as it doesn’t harm anyone.

play

For all the trauma this person may desire be understood and for all the needs they may be struggling to fulfil, they surely need to play. Play means different things to different people. Dance, music, laughter, touch, or just sitting in the shade of a tree by the creek on a slow Sunday and pondering the possibility of a walk.

the (worthwhile) tragedies of love

When you try to love someone like this, and they try to love you, we collaboratively write our own beautiful tragedy of a love story. The tragedy is a consequence of the emotional investment we both make and the vulnerable position that puts us in.

tragedy #1

We feel the joy of people we love, but we feel their pain too. We desperately wish for them to be happy and to thrive, but we are unquestionably constrained in how much we can influence their happiness. And we just have to sit with this powerlessness. This tragedy extends to people we don’t know. We may feel anonymous love in the form of empathy for victims of genocide, assault, abuse, exploitation or people who have been dealt a bad hand in life, but we are almost powerless to influence this.

tragedy #2

For one clear reason (a rare case), or for several misunderstood reasons (the more common case), a love affair can transition into something less lovely. We may learn with this person we love so dearly how it is we want to grow, but by the time that dawning has happened there is too much hurt inflicted and rupture to resolve to work on that growth together, so it is easier to start over and to do that work with somebody new, which you were inspired to do with our former love.

the (devastating) outcomes of loss of love we must avoid

When a love story closes, there are some potential tragic outcomes:

tragic outcome #1

We curate a story that the relationship ended because there is something wrong with us and that we are unlovable.

alternative outcome #1

We remind ourselves that we are hot property, and that the problem were the hurdles of misunderstanding and love fatigue that lay between us, not with us as individuals.

tragic outcome #2

We are afraid to extend our love to another and open ourselves up to the vulnerability of being in love and losing that love in the future, so we don’t. We reject love.

alternative outcome #2

We take our time to grieve, but we never take time out from love. We spend time with old friends until our love-battery is recharged enough to understand and play with new people.