With the fast approach of Valentine’s Day, we celebrate love. The love of relationships, the love of friendships, and the love within ourselves. But with all this continuous conversation about the vast topic oflove, we must stop to ask ourselves a hard question: what happens when love alone isn’t enough?
We grow up believing that love is the foundation of everything. Love creates generations of people and should be cherished. And while this is all true, love alone is just a foundation which stability we often have to check. Over time, we have to ask ourselves where the lack of communication, respect, or growth began to drift, or if it was ever included in our foundations to begin with. Feelings are often strong enough to start something, but they are not always strong enough to maintain it.
You also can love deeply and still find yourself wanting and needing more. Desiring more than love can make us feel ungrateful or greedy but wanting more than just a feeling isn’t the most terrible thing known to man. The feeling of love provides emotional safety between people. It wraps us in its arms and makes us feel secure. Until it lets go. And we realize there’s no real security in this safety. Sometimes love is there, but effort is not. Sometimes the feelings are strong, but the actions are weak. All these small factors contribute to being fully secure, which you don’t get with just emotion.
Love also has a way of making us keep our rose-tinted glasses on. We ignore the small things because there’s love. We excuse bad behavior and hold onto potential instead of reality. In doing this, love can become limiting. It can convince us that shrinking our standards and silencing our needs is simply part of “making it work” or staying through the good and the bad. It can make us stay longer than we should, waiting for love alone to fix everything, when we know it won’t.
Then there is unrequited love, loving someone who cannot meet you halfway, which is often the bare minimum in any relationship. Or loving someone who does not love you back in the same way. It is not always because they are evil or because their love was fake. Sometimes they just cannot give you the same love because they are not ready, or capable, or not willing in that moment. This kind of painful love proves the point that feelings alone are not enough to carry two people forward.
Love is not only a feeling, it is a choice, one that we pick everyday. And sometimes people aren’t in love with you but more so in love with what you do for them. What keeps love steady is the decision to remain intentional even when the feeling isn’t the best anymore.
Love is powerful, beautiful, and necessary. But it is not the exception to effort. Or a valid reason to start confusing your wants from your needs. So sometimes the most realistic conclusion we can come to about the topic of Love is that while it isn’t enough, it still matters, we just shouldn’t hold the weight of the word into 4 little letters.
