Thoughts about what love is...
If you grew up in a toxic household (even if the people who were toxic to you aren’t able to agree that they were) you may not understand what love looks or sounds like.
You know what it’s not: It’s not being controlled or criticized, demeaned or dismissed, punished or shamed.
You know it’s not tough love or getting gold stars for your elbow grease that you may have suffered greatly to produce.
And you know it’s not even being fed or clothed or roofed over your head.
You might think that maybe love is a tone of niceness instead of a tone that yells.
Or a word called love instead of a word that stings.
But to me, love is time spent making an effort to understand someone.
Love is making the effort to make sure another person knows that their perspective is not a waste of time, but that it matters and is valuable, even when it’s different than mine.
And love is also making the effort to share my own perspective, to also be understood, to also matter, so that we can have a meaningful connection based on what’s real for us both.
The flow of communicating-to-be-understood and listening-to-understand between two people, to me, is love. No matter if the flow is free and easy, or if takes a bit longer for two filters to unclog from all the times we felt so stuck inside ourselves, and so hurt by all the people who never seemed to care.
-JLK
