ACCEPTING LOVE

Accepting love or giving love is easier for some than others. Some people are raised without any exposure to being overtly loved by family or community. Others confuse permissiveness or enabling with love, which in its finest form includes honest criticism. Sex and love are mingled in the minds of the young. Quiet companionship is often the love of later years. 

I always think of love as an active behavior ... loving ... as an outer manifestation of affection, appreciation, protectiveness, loyalty, etc.. I do not believe love I cannot see in some form. Spoken love comes cheap. Delivered loving might be easily perceived or easily missed. I was raised to believe that loving should be mutual and current in whatever form it takes. I have grown to like that perception of what true loving is. 

It is strange for me to live in a time when young people have been raised with a presumption of being generally loved, no matter how unlovable or unloving they are in there own behavior. Selfishness and the interchange of loving are incompatible, but that lesson seems to have been neglected in the education of many young adults. 

Loving can be offered unselfishly. The Greek "agape". a favorite chestnut of Catholic sermons, is unconditional love for others on a rather superficial level. Love in this context generally means tolerance or charitable empathy. Soup kitchens and shelters are staffed with volunteers with agape. Agape does not seek to inspire reciprocity. It is the love of comparative strangers. 

Sharing whole, adult loving with another person in a relationship implies honesty, loyalty and understanding. It does not develop immediately, except in very rare relationships. Too often, in young adults, sexuality brings the promise of loving but that promise is stifled by sexual conflict, addiction or incompatibility. 

I believe giving love and accepting love both come with responsibility to the other person. The success or failure of a relationship depends on the willingness of those in that relationship to take that responsibility. Withholding parts of yourself in a loving relationship can be a slow poison which will eventually lead to that relationship's slow demise. 

Being responsible in loving entails first knowing who you yourself are in a relationship. Being loved is not being told who you should be by another person. Loving is not trying to tell or manipulate another person to be what you need. The early stage of healthy loving is experimentation. The experiment is simple: Can I be loving and loved for who I am and am trying to become? Can I be loving to the other person for who that person is or is trying to become? 

That takes time. That takes openness, risk and a full palette of shared emotional experiences, which can include arguments and giddy joy. That takes sobriety. No relationship made in constant drunkenness or drugged euphoria has stayed the course for very long. 

I would say that accepting love has grown harder than giving it as I have aged. I believe this is because aging and loss have challenged my understanding and acceptance of myself. However, my understanding of the responsibility of accepting love and of loving has deepened with age. This is the essence of what wise people call "commitment".