I like to write about this. I have done so several times, perhaps because, on the day this understanding fully entered my mind, it changed everything around me. I understood that I can love someone and decide I will no longer be in a relationship with that person because it is harmful to me, because it is unfair and hurts me. I understood that I can have a relationship with someone without them being the love of my life, whenever and as long as there are good feelings and the relationship elevates me, reassures me, fulfills me, and helps me to be happy.
(Romantic) love does not bring happiness, it is a healthy relationship which does. Love brings peace, security, stability. Serenity and joy. And that, dear readers, we can have without depending on anyone. As bell hooks writes, love has always been written about by men, and maybe that is why it is often mentioned in a romantic and overpowering tone. Something that needs to be achieved in order to be complete – as if we were not complete on our own. Perhaps that is the reason why it seems that our plenitude, the peak of our happiness, can only come from the realization of romantic love.
But romantic love is different from the love I refer to. Romantic love implies relationships, and this totally conditions the type of love. It happens through exchange. An exchange that is never equitable, but tries to be – let us remember that equity in this case is not a fixed point, but an ever-moving balance.
The love that fills, stabilizes, brings security and joy, does not depend on a romantic relationship. It is the exercise of loving that returns to us more love than our hearts can hold. Perhaps we can compare it to the love that most parents feel for their little child. They hardly know what their relationship will be like in the future, but that love beats in their heart in a way that seems like it is about to burst. This love – and maybe I will be controversial here – is not nourished by self-esteem (esteem is not love, but rather a recognition of one’s worth, the joy of knowing who one is), but by the exercise of love towards another. Showing love allows us to feel it more and more each time. Difficult? Not at all if we separate romantic relationships from love.
*Ler em Tudo sobre o Amor, de bell hooks.
