Love Is Not a Thing

Read Time: 7 minutes

We hear about how important love is all the time, and how we need it in so many ways:

 

“All you need is love,”

“You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” 

“You are committing with these vows to love this person until the day you die.”

“You must love your child unconditionally.” 

“Choose love, not fear.”

 

Which good God, how annoying.  

 

I mean holy fucking hell.  Where do you even start with all of that?  How do you…just cram the feeling of love into your brain more?  How do you manifest those feelings chemicals in your skull? What an absolutely exhausting fucking chore.

 

The struggle to do this leads to a lot of thoughts like:

 

“I’m currently feeling that my husband is a lazy sack of garbage.  Shit, am I failing at my marriage vows?

“People say you have to love yourself before you can love other people, but I generally feel indifferent about myself.  Fuck, I don’t want to be single! How do I feel more love for myself?”  

“Am I a bad person because I mostly think my goth daughter is kind of a shithead?  Aren’t I supposed to love her no matter what?”

“Are there actually people who love everybody? Am I an asshole because I don’t?  No, right?”

 

Let’s back up, because we’re off base here.  Consider first that love comes in like a billion forms.

The Forms of Love

 

 

Love is you listening to your aunt’s boring story so that she has someone to talk at, it’s a description for how you feel about curly fries, and it’s even a place that sometimes, you get to be in.  

 

This Love Place is a magical land where some special person for you becomes superhuman.  They become amazingly cute, funny, and insightful to you even though everybody else on the planet looks at your boyfriend is like, “That guy?  Really?”

 

Being in this love place is the most incredible feeling we’ll ever feel, so we assume that this love–the feeling of love–is what’s really important.  We assume that the feeling of love is what makes society function, and what will save the world.  We assume that the feeling of love is what John Lennon was singing about.

 

And maybe it was. I don’t know. I didn’t know the guy.  But if it was what he was singing about, the dude was wrong.

 

Feeling love feels nice, and it’s great motivation, but it’s not why love really matters.  It’s not why, “All you need is love.” Your feelings of love aren’t the love that keeps families together, that connects you with strangers, and allows you to feel good about yourself.  It’s not the most important part of making this shitty earth more tolerable. 

 

That love–that indispensable, all-important, you-need-this-to-function-in-all-areas-of-life love is love as an action.  To sum it up with John Mayer lyrics: 

 

“Love ain’t a thing; love is a verb.”

 

So the good news is, you don’t actually have to feel any more love than you already do, which is nice, because you had zero control over that, and how can you possibly feel love for people like bigots, criminals, and Instagram influencers?  

 

The love you feel is, in the big picture, pretty irrelevant.  The love you show is fucking everything, and this applies to all areas of your life.

 

Loving Your Family

 

When you say, “I love my spouse/brother/grandma,” you inevitably leave off two crucial words: “generally speaking.”  

 

 

Like, generally speaking, I love my wife.  I very often have feelings of adoration, infatuation, appreciation, admiration, and joy that add up to love in her general direction. My most common feeling, if I have to sum it up, is definitely one of love.  

 

But not all the time.  I don’t feel love unconditionally.  Of course not.  What are you, insane?  Have you seen literally any married couple?  We share an entire life together.  Do you realize how much time that is? I’ll give you a hint: it’s all of it. All of the time.  

 

No matter what, with any two people who are together that much, there are 1000% going to be moments–even if they’re rare–where our primary thought is, “Okay, go fuck yourself a little, my dear.”  We have millions of feelings a day, so by that nature, none of them can be unconditional.

 

No love is perfect, and part of that imperfection is that sometimes we just don’t feel the love we generally have because there are a million things that can temporarily get in the way of that feeling. Sometimes, the other person is fucking annoying and love feelings just aren’t blasting through our brains.  Sometimes, you’re really focused on this slice of pizza to the point where “I love my husband,” isn’t currently in your consciousness. Sometimes, you experience a dip in dopamine, and your brain chemicals just aren’t letting the love feeling in at the moment.

 

I don’t feel love for my wife all the time because literally nobody feels love for literally anything all the time.  

 

This is fine, because that’s not what the vows of marriage mean.  I won’t always feel love for her for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.  I won’t feel love towards my wife till death do us part. That will mostly come, but sometimes go.

 

But I will act with love towards her regardless of how I feel in a given moment.  Even if my internal feeling is the aforementioned, “Go fuck yourself, my dear,” I will show love every day.  That is to say that I will move heaven and earth to put her needs before my own as much as I can until one of us croaks.

 

This is a crucial distinction to make.  In all forms of love, this is what really matters.  

 

So no, in this way, you won’t love your parents, your siblings–you won’t even love your kids unconditionally.  I mean of course not.  

 

 

Have you met literally any 13-year-old?  No one actually feels love for a 13-year-old.  I’m not buying it.  They remember the big picture of love they generally feel for them, and show them love with the hope in mind that one day, they won’t be so…like a 13-year-old.

 

This applies to everyone you love.  Regardless of how you feel right now towards someone you love, you must show them love at all times, to always act with their best interest in mind, and act with care and grace for them.  If you do this, you’re doing your job, and you’re putting the love into the world that it needs, even if at this moment, your kid is a porn-addicted fucking asshole.

 

Loving Yourself

 

“You need to love yourself before you can love other people.”  This is true. But here’s the good news: You don’t have to feel love for yourself, like, at all–and certainly not all the time.

 

If you feel love for yourself all the time, you have something seriously wrong with you.  Something is fucked up in your head if, in this constantly evolving, imperfect, messy world, your end mental result to everything is something like, “But boy, I sure am really awesome,” and giving yourself a high five.  

 

If you hold out on getting into a relationship because “I need to love myself first,” and that’s what you think loving yourself is most relevantly, you’ll never get into a relationship.

 

Loving yourself in your head is irrelevant.  

 

Consistently doing the loving thing for yourself is vital.  This makes others more open to loving you, and it trains you in how you treat others.  If you treat yourself like crap, you will in some way treat others like crap as well.

 

People struggle with this because they don’t know what it means to love one’s self.  They think that doing the loving thing for yourself is having two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, and watching lots of shows about middle-aged rich ladies with too much plastic surgery.  They think it’s about doing what feels the best right now.

 

In fact though, loving yourself is about doing what is best for yourself.  It’s about loving future you. It’s not about what you want right now.  It’s about getting yourself closer to what you really want in your life in general.

It’s sacrificing the ice cream you want for the abs you really want.  It’s sacrificing the dumbass listicle you want for the success on a project you really want.  It’s sacrificing seeing literally every single Marvel movie for doing I don’t know–anything that will help you long term at all. 

 

Love yourself in this way before you bring someone else into your mess.

 

Loving Everyone

 

There are people out there who claim to love everyone.  Like they claim that they feel love for everyone in the world.

 

These people are 98% fucking liars, and 2% total and complete lunatics.

 

You really only have so much capacity to feel love.  Most of us can’t extend that beyond our family and like, 3 friends max.  Don’t ever think that it’s a good thing to be able to feel love for everybody you meet.  It’s not. It’s weird, and almost always fraudulent.  

 

You don’t love the guy you don’t know who smells like farts on the bus.  You don’t love your co-workers. You don’t actually love thy neighbor–not like that.  Gross.

 

But here’s the good news:  You do you have endless capacity to show love.  You can always approach someone with intent of putting them first, to think about their needs, and to move heaven and earth for them as if they’re the most important person in the world in a given moment.  You can always assume the best of someone and not be a judgmental know-it-all prick to anyone.

 

You can approach everyone on the God damn earth leading with love, and seeking out the best of them, and you can do it while thinking they’re all douchebags.

 

 

And that’s the really noble, powerful, magical love.  That’s the kind that can change the world. It’s the kind where you stick to your vow to show love to someone forever no matter how much they get into model trains when they turn 45.  It’s to always try to sacrifice of your current self in favor of future you. It’s to act like a total stranger is your brother, and to love him as such, even if on the inside you’re thinking, “God, this guy sucks.”

 

A lot of people out there aren’t loved in the sense that nobody feels love for them, and that may never change.  Some people are assholes who frankly don’t deserve love, and some just have shitty luck, or a face that’s tough to get past.

 

But you can show everybody love, and showing love to people who would otherwise become bitter assholes is how you make fewer bad people, and that’s so fucking valuable.

 

So feel love for whomever brings the love out of you, and put your focus on those people in general.  Sure. 

 

But show love as much as you can all the time.  Act with love whenever possible. Make love your default to your family, your fellow man and lady, and perhaps most importantly, yourself.  Lead with love in your actions no matter what–even if your feelings do mostly amount to, “Fuck this guy.”