My focus as a therapist has been on relationships and trauma. I chose these specialties because I needed to learn about them for my own healing journey. When it came to relationships, I did everything a person should not do. I dated the “bad boy,” I dated the “Ken doll,” I married the “Christian man in the church.” All ended in disaster. And so, my journey to find a healthy relationship began.
One of the most incredible things I learned is that we all want to find love, but most of us don’t even know what it is. I discovered this during a particularly difficult season with my man, Dave. We were not doing well at all. It seemed like the harder I fought to keep the relationship, the further away he moved from me. So, I began to ask myself, what is love in this situation? Is it loving for me to try to convince him that I can love him when he doesn’t seem to want it? Is it loving myself to insist to him that I am worthy of being loved? Why do I want to be in a relationship where I have to beg to be seen? But then, is it love to walk away? Won’t that add to any rejection he may have felt in his life?
I took my question to other resources. TikTok, Facebook, movies, old love songs. Everything fell short, felt shallow, or contradictory. So I started asking my clients. It was a therapy strategy, but it was also a “research” question. I just wanted to see if I was the only one who struggled with this question.
What I heard stunned me. I had responses like “It makes me happy to see her happy”, “I have never been more attracted to anyone else the way I am to him,” “He/She’s a good parent”, “I like how he/she makes me feel”. What? This is what we think love is? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be “loved” because of what I can do for someone.
I do not have time to go into the messy details, but I will say that after wrestling deeply with this question, I found a conclusion. Love is not what I get from someone or what I give. It’s about creating a safe space of acceptance for one another. What I found is that finding satisfying love is counterintuitive, and if you want to find it, you must get real with yourself and with the person you love, whether romantic, a friend, family, or yourself.
Dave and I made it through that difficult season and many more after that. But if you want to hear more about how to find what we are all looking for in relationships, stay tuned for my next few articles. This is only part one.
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