We all pass through life wondering about love. Some find it and some can’t and yet we are all connected through it. Maybe Johnny Depp sums it up best at the end of Don Juan de Marco when he says:
There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio.
What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for?
The answer to each is the same.
Only Love.
But Love is not just love, is it? Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about, those we hold in high regard. Love can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.
At the end of the day, the best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.
Still most of us are afraid of it or at least we think we are. I think we aren’t afraid of love particularly. We are afraid of all the junk we’ve attached to love. And we have convinced ourselves that by being cautious with our feelings, by withholding them or withholding one tiny word from the people we actually love or are in love with might shield us from that junk. But it won’t.
After all we are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our feelings and affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.
A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.” The terms you agree to in any given relationship are connected to, but not defined by, whether you’ve said “I love you” or not. “I love you” can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful and I’m going to do everything in my power to be your partner for the rest of my life. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m in transition right now, so let’s go easy on the promises and take it as it comes. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m not interested in a commitment with you, now or probably ever, no matter how groovy or beautiful you continue to be.
The point is we get to say it. We get to define the terms of your life. We get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of our feelings for other people.
SO DO IT!
Be vocal about love, be brave, be bold. Just do it. Doing so will free you from the tense tangle that withholding weaves, because in the end withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small hearted and it makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy is for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will and it will be easy.
We are all going to die, so let’s do it with love in our hearts and love in our lives.
It might be genuinely mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering and i promise you it will be worth it.
photography by li hui
