What is Love?

What is love?
Is not holding anything back the key to true love?
How do you know when you are ready for a relationship?
Does being in a relationship mean compromise?

Last night a friend and I were texting back and forth on these same questions. Earlier this year he broke off a 6 year relationship and recently he began “seeing” a mutual friend of ours. Things seem to be going well and he is now trying to figure out whether he is ready to be in a relationship again and what that all means. Considering everything I have been through this year, I have been evaluating my life and the all past relationships to try and figure out where I have gone wrong. No, I do not think my divorce was actually my fault as it was not a typical situation, it is actually quite unusual. Nonetheless, for a while I knew that being married to Mr. X was not working and part at least was my fault as I let it get that far by agreeing to marry him even when I had doubts a few months before the wedding.

That is another story and not as important right now as this. So in talking to my friend last night, I started to express how I wasn’t quite sure I knew what romantic love was anymore. I assumed I knew but lately I have been thinking that maybe it was never love, maybe I gave the best I could and as much as I could but I don’t think I would call that love. So it leads to the question: What is love? And how do you recognize it? Back when I actually believed in love, I assumed that love was trust and respect for your partner. Love involved caring about someone else more than you cared for yourself. However, that may be a little masochistic as I think ultimately one partner ends up giving up a lot of who they are or what they want, to make a relationship work. My friend said a relationship is compromise, both letting some things go and working together towards a future that involves both parties. But I feel like one partner always ends up giving more than the other. I don’t think it is done consciously. I think you just let things go because your partner doesn’t like the same thing or it just becomes inconvenient in the grand scheme of things. An example: I love dancing, I love going out with friends to a club, or party where I get to dance the night away. My ex did not enjoy it. When we dated, he went and danced a bit, but ultimately would say, just dance with your friends. Eventually when we got married, he stopped going all together and I ended up going to clubs with friends, and attending parties either alone or with a friend or relative. After a while it just didn’t seem right that I would go alone, so I stopped going all together. No he did not ask me to stop, yet I knew he didn’t enjoy it, so I stopped doing it. See where I am going with this? A partner ends up giving things up unconsciously to accommodate the other. I won’t say if it is right, wrong, or the way it should be, I am just wondering: Is it always like this? Does it have to be this way? How can it be different?

Another thing I have been thinking about lately is how I sometimes change what I like and accommodate for the other person. I guess everyone does this to some extend but I was thinking how much of who we are do we “let go” of to make a relationship work. Should being with someone be hard work? I don’t actually think I or anyone else considers it hard work when you are in a relationship but giving up a part of who you are or what you like for someone else is a big deal, maybe not one you see at first but definitely down the road. So what does that mean? Is it that you are living a lie by holding things back? Or is just the way life is, like a partner sometimes stops doing things they enjoyed, or changes habits to accommodate the other. My friend brought up a question that is really good and I wish I had an answer to it: Is not holding anything back the key to true love? True love, yikes there is something everyone wants and yet it feels like such few actually have it. I don’t know, true love is one of those terms I have never used to describe any of my relationships even when I was married. Not to bring my parents into this mix, but considering they got divorce when I was very young and neither re-married, I don’t think I ever had an example of what true love looks like. So what is true love?

And lastly, when is someone ready for a relationship? Is there ever a right time? I for one don’t think I was actually “looking” for one, each time it happened. Every relationship just came as a natural next step after dating the person for a while and thinking I wanted something more exclusive. But now I wonder, is there ever a time when one feels “ready” for a relationship? How does one even know?