Relationships, what comes next?

Love is not about keeping you,

It is not about being better than those before me.

No. For me it’s:

“Can I be good for you?”

Love is something I’ve always been fascinated about when it comes to romantic relationships. Having that one person you want to tell everything to first person whether it’s good or bad. Someone who loves you as a friend, a partner, and who wants to grow with you as you face the world. It sounds great, doesn’t it?

As I’ve come to learn love has lofty ideals in our head but the reality is sometimes far from what we expected. It’s also interesting how our ideals for love change as we go through various relationships. These experiences influence us and make us ask ourselves“How do I want to be loved?” Another question is “How do I want to love others?” And the follow-up to that “Are they going to accept the way that I love them?”

Learning how you want to be loved is something that can come naturally. However, learning to love others is hard. It’s something that doesn’t come to us as easily because we tend to focus on how we want to be loved. How we’re worthy of it. How we need it. This is shaky ground to walk on. Love is about learning and adjusting how to love someone as much as it’s about how someone loves you. It’s a partnership. Sometimes one that isn’t equal, but it’s still worthwhile even in those moments.

The short snippet at the top is from a poem that I wrote. It exemplifies what I’ve been asking myself as I try to find love again. I’ve learned that trying to hold onto love as tight as I can is useless and it only hurts my relationship. What added to that hurt was thinking I had to be better than their previous partners. Comparing myself to them and saying “I can be better than them.” But I wasn’t them. I’ll never be them and that’s the point. I was chosen because I was me, not anyone else.

In the future, our focus on might be better placed building our relationship. Not trying to build something new on top of what’s old, but focusing on the new foundations that we’ll be setting down.  

Love is like the wind on a warm summer day: It comes and goes when it chooses. All we can do is appreciate it for the time that it stays. We can’t cage the wind, but we can whisper how glad we are that it’s here, how happy it’s come to us when we didn’t even know we needed it. When we finally start to feel the breeze calm, all we can do is extend our hand and ask “were we good for you?”