Why do we continue to Love?
Because it’s not a choice at all.
That at the end of it all, on our way off the earth, out of this experience, it won’t be our possessions, our anger, our pain, our anxieties that follow us onward, that hold us as we sigh our final breath, but love’s embrace to which we surrender.
Love is this inexplicable phenomenon that transcends all reason. All science. Emotion in itself is tricky and complex. We all experience the spectrum relatively the same way, but how we respond to it, how it affects us and which feelings rule us vary from person to person.
With anger, we are angry when something infuriating happens. Someone cuts you off in traffic; suddenly, you have the foulest mouth next to a trucker on hour 9 of driving. A coworker sends you a snarky email; you’re typing faster than Stephen King writing a novel. The old man at the yoga studio yells at you for making a noise; you have less zen than a monkey with rabies. Some of us are ruled by anger; we find it and feel it wherever we go.
But, if there is no triggering event, you forget about it at least within a day, or you don’t forget, but remembering doesn’t necessarily trigger the same level of anger. (Maybe just disgust). Even more so, you’ll tend to avoid conversations, people, places and things that incite anger.
Same thing with sadness. Unless you’re an angsty teen (and I can say that because I was one), you typically avoid the things that make you sad. Songs, movies, people. Whatever the trigger, you don’t invite it into your life.
But love is an entity. It is a power, a force. It operates almost externally from the rest of the emotional lineup. It doesn’t care about triggers, about pain. It doesn’t need to be within the vicinity of the trigger to unleash its wrath.
Love and pain are almost synonymous, whether in a relationship with others, yourself, or a piece of the world.
Why do we continue to love after death? Why do we continue to love after someone betrays us? Why do we love newborn babies and puppies? Why do we love even when it hurts? Why do we sacrifice parts of ourselves for love? Why do artists continue to create for a living when it often provides little to no return?
I am in a romantic relationship. I have been a few serious ones and done my fair share of dating. I have learned that some of the most profound self-development and growth is done when you share parts of your life with someone else.
You learn about your patterns of behaviour, thoughts, likes and dislikes. You learn how to communicate. There is nothing easy about being in partnership with another human. A stranger up until they weren’t.
There is so much joy, peace and abundance. There is also work. That work can be incredibly frustrating and painful. We as humans tend to be selfish; selfishness often gets a bad rep, but as an evolved species who still operate much as we did as cavemen, selfishness is a modern word for survival.
I once saw a video, probably a TikTok, of a girl who started by saying, “whenever I’m arguing with my boyfriend and think he’s being selfish or immature, I picture him like this,” and she proceeded to show a reel of him as a young kid. It resonated because whenever I feel myself on the defence, raising my voice in an argument or suddenly unable to express myself clearly, I imagine little Emily throwing a tantrum inside. It’s her, not me taking the reigns.
That imagery is a beautiful exercise in self-compassion. If a toddler threw a tantrum when you said they didn’t want to share a toy, would you immediately wonder why they were such an immature, selfish dingus?
Probably not. Adults are often the same, but they are wearing a grown-up skin suit, so we are not so quick to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are behaving that way because they don’t possess the tools to know any better.
We forget that we have fully developed brains and have the power to be better. And most of us are not equipped with those tools at all, so we continue to behave like toddlers when we are misunderstood. We don’t even realize we’re doing something wrong half the time, even though something about our behaviour feels inherently wrong.
Perhaps, we’re too stubborn to abandon people who hurt us because we wouldn’t abandon ourselves. Because even though our best self is overshadowed by the evil demon version of us who never learns, a smidge of that inherent love keeps banging its drum, shining its light, fucking screaming at us to keep trying.
Nothing about human life is simple, partly because we make it difficult. We want someone to love us out of our shadows; we want to love someone out of theirs. Even when they are infuriating, even when it’s complicated and messy.
We are still animals; our goals are inherently the same as other species; keeping ourselves alive and powerful. But if we were purely bones and blood and inspired only to continue the genetic line, we would mostly just procreate and fight. If we didn’t have love, we’d all just be a bunch of blabbering babies, giving up on each other.
Instead, we search for meaning in everything we do. Our work, relationships, hobbies, and choices. We find disillusionment or dissatisfaction when our actions are operational. Do we recognize that those negative feelings are the scales absent of love?
Do we recognize that passion, compassion, and drive are all bi-products of love? That loving continues to present itself regardless of the trigger being anywhere in sight. Our life is not kill or be killed like the rest of the animal kingdom but a complex pattern of behaviour fueled by love. That we’d actually be quicker to let someone break us apart than give up our chance to love or be loved.
That at the end of it all, on our way off the earth, out of this experience, it won’t be our possessions, our anger, our pain, our anxieties that follow us onward, that hold us as we sigh our final breath, but love’s embrace to which we surrender.
