How do you want to be loved?
You might assume I’m speaking about romantic love and in a way I am.
In a way, I’m also talking about the complexities of being human.
We like to think we are little islands and yet we also know that each of us contains a deep undeniable yearning for connection.
It is what scientists like to call “wired” but it’s so much more than that.
We are biologically social creatures.
It is our nature. It is part of us.
And it is also part of what we need to survive.
Layered in this survival is the obvious that biologist focus on – the need to reproduce! But there lies many more layers and complexities to our social survival.
Our need for touch for example is imperative to healthy human development. Babies lacking touch but receiving all “basic” survival requirements still die because touch, skin to skin pressure, human to human contact is woven into the fabric of our survival.
Connection is not optional.
All of these layers interacting upon each other, our environment, and how we grew to know connection – all of this makes up our reference points in how to interact in our larger social web.
As someone who grew up with deeply problematic reference points for connection and relationality, I had to learn these things late in the game. Perhaps you can relate. For those of us who lacked social and relational reference points, we either became even more socially retarded, or we had a lightbulb or series of lightbulbs that showed us the learning that lies ahead.
Despite us all having deep innate need for connection, we all go about it quite differently.
I think growing up immersed in deeply problematic systems helped to show me the reference points for a life driven from pain, shame, and judgement. I see how it has manifested in addiction, avoidance, isolation, and mental illness.
On the other hand, other relationships have gifted me other reference points.
Through these relationships I’ve learned the power and healing of being seen, accepted, and loved for who I am. I’ve learned how healthy conflict and repair can weave more trust, love, respect into a relationship and deepen it.
This past year, I’ve entered into a new relationship, full of possibility, riding the waves of hope and yet also experience. I’ve carried my own reference points – the whole village of them – with me along for the ride.
And after battling internally of what externally seemed to be a perfect fit, internally I felt more and more incongruence until I had to come to terms that our lives were fundamentally built on conflicting values.
I made the difficult decision to end it.
The ending itself seemed to further prove that it was the right decision.
So after all of that preamble, I want to share with you one of my own personal more important values and reference points for love.
This is a non-negotiable for me.
Having grown up in an insular world where my one and only caregiver doesn’t know who I am, nor has the capacity to see me as a separate individuated being with her own wants, needs, and desires, my own need to be seen, known, and loved for who I am is an overwhelming one.
This has manifested in my life in many ways, having little tolerance for superficial relationships and social niceties, and also having and maintaining deep and meaningful connections and relationships across the span of time, distance, and cultures.
It also means in a romantic sense, that I want to feel chosen.
Not because I check their boxes.
Not because they fear being alone for the rest of their lives.
But because they like and want to be around me.
If I were to sum up why I ended my last relationship, this is it.
Maybe I checked his boxes.
Maybe the fear of being alone was greater than the discomfort of being with someone who you don’t really mesh with.
These are common human things.
And I don’t judge for it.
There are a lot of people making a lot of concessions based on their own internal maps and reference points for love and how to be in connection.
I too have a lot of reference points that map me to this very kind of relationship – it’s the one I’ve known my whole life.
Which is exactly why I want something different.
Years ago – maybe 9 or 10 – I was in a relationship that created new and different reference points for love.
Although it wasn’t a forever partnership, we both learned, healed, and loved greatly.
I am forever grateful for this experience because time and time again I come back to these core reference points, as they are real, tangible, and embodied.
It’s important to clarify that I’m not trying to compare partners, but more comparing social operating systems and compatibility.
Because of this experience, I know how over time, it feels for someone to want to really know me.
It’s slow.
It takes time.
Like growing a garden, these types of relationships allow for complexity, humanity, and space.
Of course, it’s also important to broaden our reference points for love to our entire network of relationships.
I look to my deep and long-lasting friendships – those trusted ones who know me, and love me.
I, much like everyone I think, can get distracted by all of the details – are our lifestyles compatible, values, etc. – but perhaps for me at least, in my core, there are certain tender places that particularly in the romantic relationship sense, become the deciding factor.
I’ll sum it up with something I said to my dear friend the other day …
The undercurrent that drove his decision making is fear.
And although I too feel fear, and I too struggle with anxiety, in the deepest of my being I cannot allow myself to make important and pivotal decisions based in fear.
I never have and I don’t know why or how, but there is something so deep and so strong that moves me in my life – something else. Maybe it’s desire, life force, great spirit, I don’t know what exactly it is.
It feels like the tide.
It feels like the wild and nourishing force of the Pacific Ocean.
Some people call it “trusting the Universe” and I’m not sure about that either.
What I am sure of, is I don’t need a name for it.
As long as I am in relationship with it, she guides me, moves me, through this journey called life.