Working on Love: First Love
Lessons Learned, Part 2/2
Last week was a deep look at what love has been to me. Specifically, I took a good, hard look at the guiding rule of my love life, the idea that has plagued me: that I must earn love.
It has been difficult work thus far to realize this. It seems to be the rule that we struggle the most with seeing ourselves. And for this, I am thankful for good therapists.
But at this point, I have traced the thought until finding a fundamentally crucial moment, the first love.
About Grace
If last week’s letter was about the promise of struggle, this one might be about grace because this was the one of the most vulnerable moments of my life. Let me clarify this. I certainly mean vulnerable in the sense that I was vulnerable to someone’s presence and shared intimacy. Words from my dear friend’s recent wedding in Seattle ring through here: being vulnerable means you are able to be hurt by someone.
But I do mean vulnerable in a more specific way, something closer to risk.
Having carried myself in an unloving way until arriving at this first love, I was not ready for connection. I was, though, ready to settle. And so when my friend, who was already in a committed relationship, made a move, I accepted it as the only form of love that I deserved.
Because we were never, and could never be, a fully acknowledged relationship, I did not need to confront my inability to love and receive love. My underdeveloped sense of self-worth and self-love provided me a very small space to accept love, and this non-relationship fit perfectly.
Difficult as it was, this worked for me. I did not need to learn how to be a good partner or anything vital to the work of a healthy relationship. I was someone’s escape, and I thought myself lucky to receive even that much of love.
When the end came, I was heartbroken. I mean this in the classic sleepless, stop eating, wounded heart sense. I was a deep mess. I remember one of the poems I wrote during this time:
Image 4
Rope frays at the knot:
“Please, don’t go”
In this process of separating from this first love is the idea of risk I mentioned earlier. The pain of this experience was transformative, and it could have been for the worse. This was a moment when I could have been left to develop hatred and blame. Using today’s terms, I could have fallen into this red-pill, incel culture at this point. The risk was hatred, the gain was grace.
This first love brought something graceful to me, compassion. Along the long road out of this, this person still acted in a way of care that nullified the possibility of hatred being my response. This experience became a moment of gratitude. She was older than me, and maybe that is the perspective that helped this theme emerge. There was a point where she quoted a common expression in Irish weddings, “I hope today is the worst day of your life.” This shocked me, but she explained that it is a way of wishing someone that no part of the future is worse than this. To me, it is a confused expression, but it was given with a sentiment of care as I expressed my own struggle of letting go, and it summarizes her handling of me in this separation period. I had and have appreciation for the care given here, despite the pain.
Although the healing from all of this did not begin until total separation (and could not have begun until then), I certainly took something from this. Here is what I learned: in separation or unity, to love someone is to be ready to help them suffer.
Trevor
