On Love

As a continuation from the other day about what love is, and what it isn’t. To recap we reviewed why things might be a bit skewed, what can happen in a life and how knowing yourself is the first step in the process of love.

Ok.

What about other people? Where do they come in?

So engaging in non romantic relationships was a critical part of this for me, it forced me to build and be satisfied in other ways, other than what I had been traditionally putting emphasis on. It allowed me to develop friendships in a way I really hadn’t before. Who I was, how I interacted (I traditionally didn’t have a healthy way of engaging with women), and build into that. I didn’t have any issues stipulating the terms and conditions of how I engaged (platonic).

And then traveling to Vancouver and meeting Gordy changed that even more. He presented On Relationship. I read that over the course of a week in Sweden, staying in hostels and seeing The Northern Lights. It changed my life, started to tie in things I’ve heard for years, and a lot of it centered around expectations.

I used to sit on the field after a practice (or on the bleachers after swim practice) until no one was left. All of the kids used to wait for hours for my mother to pick us up. She was always late. Always in a rush, never seemed to have time on her side. We grew up angry and frustrated by this behavior and assumed in some ways it reflected on us. We weren’t important enough to be on time, our mother wasn’t a “good” mother, yada yada. This emotional reaction, this perception, was created out of the simple expectation that she would be on time. Now as a child, you don’t have much for the means of handling situations yourself, but a simple change in that expectation could have saved hours and hours of rumination.

This circles back to a slight shift that occurred one day when I was in a counselling session, she asked me, “have you ever considered your expectations don’t meet reality?” “Of course not.” I thought, as, why shouldn’t I, couldn’t I, expect a parent to behave like a parent? However driving home from that appointment. It shifted my entire relationship. That one simple thing changed the course of my life.

Come back to Sweden, reading this powerful book, and here it is printed as words on the page. Our expectations are what kill our ability to maintain control over ourselves and our reactions. The stories we have in our heads about what people should or shouldn’t do, our own creations, are somehow expected and demanded?

So to build a basis for a healthy relationship, no matter the circumstances, is to understand and develop a healthy understanding of expectations. For love to happen, part of it is to let go, and know that life unfolding, the growth, development and changes that occur, are not in spite of you, but instead a part of the entire experience. They are not to be shuddered, to be subdued they are to be embraced and understood, to be accepted and it is us who need to adjust and ensure our expectations aren’t getting in the way of allowing a meaningful relationship to exist.

If you can know yourself and understand you will grow and change and most likely are not static, and if you can understand how you hold expectations which might not be realistic, those have been the first two lessons in love I have to share. This all comes into the final piece to discuss later, how it all ties together in your expression of love, what that means and what you do to be complete and satisfied.

Knowing something isn’t half the battle, it’s a quarter, the three quarters are the implementation and adjustments needed to integrate.