The courage to love

ECFThe courage to love

#conversation, #love, #friendship, #intimacy

To love is to care; to unconditionally support the well-being of the other. To love is to be able to say no. Love is relational, multidirectional, and might not be reciprocal. But loving can also be circumscribed to an individual: To love yourself. And yet, you can get to love the other by loving yourself, as much as you can learn to love yourself by selflessly loving the other. It requires courage to love because through love, the suffering of others can become your own. To love is to accept this conflict; to take a leap into the unknown.

E met C for the first time in 2009. Since then, their friendship has been like an elastic band; sometimes a safety net, sometimes a whiplash. Despite this, they take care of each other in ways they couldn’t care for themselves. They often talk about love: While C’s spills all around, E’s remains timid. Through each other, and the clashes their different views on love create, they are learning how to love. To love is to learn to love.

C: What do you find most difficult when dealing with your own emotions and how to express them?

E: Maybe the lack of synchronicity. For a long time I was scared of showing my emotions; I thought that other people would adquiere some power over me by doing so. Generally, I didn’t trust people, and I would be very cautious about what I would share with others. While everyone else was learning how to interact and to feel with others, I was learning to repress my feelings; and at some point I stopped being clear about what I was actually feeling. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the repression, I guess. With the passing of time I changed my attitude towards people, but I keep automatically containing what I feel. I relativize it, scrutinize it, compare it, distance from it, or ignore it. And that makes me feel asynchronized with many people. It has advantages: Since I rarely respond to anger or impulse I avoid unreflective confrontations; but it also separates me from people who feel in a much more immediate way, and who also expect a similar response from the other. This is particularly difficult with the people I love, because I think they expect something more from me and they feel disappointed when that something won’t come, or comes diluted. In addition, I think there is a growing culture of feeling intensely, from which I often feel very far, but that’s another question.

E: The other day we were talking about how I’ve been learning alongside you while you were learning to love/to love yourself. Can you recall any time in which you’ve learnt from me too?

C: Each time I’ve felt overgrown by negative emotions I’d look to you as an example of good practice. I don’t dislike my exacerbated capacity to feel, but it can be painful when negative feelings or thoughts take the lead and push me into destructive loops. Many times, when that happened I’d look at you for inspiration, as the kind of person that keeps her shit together. But sometimes that was painful too, because I would compare us instead, and I was clearly in a disadvantaged position. However, since I’m more stable, whenever I feel I’m having an excessive visceral reaction I often think on how you would react, and generally it helps.

C: Are you afraid of loving? Of vulnerability and exposition, and the subsequent possibility of being hurt?

E: I don’t fear loving as much as establishing relationships in which I cannot correspond to the person loving me the way I think they expect me to. That makes me feel great insecurity about my own feel-

ings, and fear of hurting the other person, since it’s often them who turn towards me more intensely. Then I start giving up space to please the other, and I try to accommodate myself to them. It is then when I become vulnerable, because it becomes harder and harder to say no, and I place myself in situations I don’t want to be in. When someone loves me intensely, I often feel debt and pressure to be reciprocal, and guilt for being unable to express the feeling back as strongly. I’m scared of disappointing, and not meeting expectations. For that reason I find it so hard to build intimate ties. Perhaps I should value my own feelings and needs more.

E: Have you noticed any change in your way of loving / loving yourself from the moment in which you start to gain understanding about mental health and queer / not normative affects?

C: About mental health… My biggest change has been becoming more patient and comprehensive with myself. I’ve learnt that I was being hypocritical: I would acknowledge no human is perfect, but I wouldn’t allow myself to be imperfect in spite of it. I needed to be on top of my game, standing out and being the best. Mediocrity was terrifying. And that only caused me suffering. Especially because not only am I imperfect, as everyone else is, but I have the extra burden of a mental disorder. Fortunately, I’ve learnt to listen to myself, and to feel proud just for achieving things that mean a greater effort to me than to neuro-normative people. I’m also making great efforts to avoid comparing myself to others, even when it’s in favor of myself, because it does no good. About non-normative loving… up until today I haven’t done so well, but I’m working on it. The first time I considered loving someone beyond a normative relationship was when I was about 21. At that time Yellow World by Albert Espinosa was of great help. Honestly, I think that many of my issues when sustaining normative relationships derive from my non normative perception of love and affect. So, I’m a bit troubled by it. Loving myself despite my mental condition relies mostly upon myself, but I haven’t drawn the rules when it comes to loving someone else, it’s all more socially modulated, and I’m still not sure how to navigate it.

C: Can you identify any moment in your childhood, or education that might have conditioned the way you love yourself and prefer to be loved?

E: I don’t really know… I’m fortunate because I’ve always felt loved by my family and friends. Somehow I’ve been instilled that to love is as much to care as it is to love, and thanks to that I’m able to uncon-

In Spanish, “querer” (to love) also means to want. So, “te quiero” at once says I love you and I want you. Amar (to love) is more widely used in Latin American Spanish. In Spain it is more commonly restricted to literary language. ditionally love those whom I care for, even though I’m not clear what my loving position towards them is. I don’t know if this makes any sense… I sometimes lack words to speak about this! On the other hand, I can’t really figure out why it’s so difficult for me to build intimate bonds. I guess my childhood was rather isolated and away from the group, but I can’t see reasons to keep complicating so much, because from my teens onwards my relationships have been positive. It’s true that in my house we’ve always been compassionate and forgiving with each other, but extremely demanding with ourselves. I guess that affects how you love yourself somehow.

E: One of my major problems when speaking about love is precisely the lack of right words. I think the verbal language of love is so influenced by normative romantic relationships that it isn’t appropriate to refer to other kinds of affects. It’s also extremely idiomatic. Is there any word in Spanish you would like to redefine, erase or incorporate to make speaking about love easier?

C: I think we should definitely verbalize more affect among friends. And also physical affect (I’m not talking about sex here!). We should tell each other we love us. And romantic love language should stop being possessive[1]. I don’t like saying someone is mine, nor anyone saying I belong to them.

E: I would like that ‘te quiero’ (I love you) stopped meaning by default ‘estoy enamorado de ti’ (I’m in love with you). And also, to be able to tell someone how much I care without having to make a thousand detours… ‘Me importas’ (I care about you), who says that?! I also think ‘me gustas”’(I like you) should stop being exclusively romantic. I like being with you, and I like you as a person. But that can sound creepy too…

C: Honestly, ‘amar’ (to love) is a tool we don’t use in Spain[2]. If we used it more often, we could easily use ‘querer’ (to love) for non-romantic kinds of love. I don’t use ‘me gusta’ (I like) in a romantic way anymore, but then I need to footnote ‘I like you, as a friend’.

E: To me ‘te quiero’ (I love you) is nearly a taboo word. I don’t think I’ve said it without drama in at least 10 years.

You should practice that… C:

This keyword contains a Q&A between C and E, exchanged after both had read Schulman’s text on Manic Flight Reaction and Ahmed’s What’s the use?. Each asked 3 questions to the other, without previous agreement, about how they feel and understand love. The conversation happened on Whatsapp and was originally written in Spanish. It has been adapted and translated for the purpose of this text. The images show an excerpt of a previous conversation between them.