Humans Being In Love

Us humans try to stuff love into heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, long-stemmed roses, lavish gifts, and pen-scribed poems. We do this because of our need to somehow capture love - like it’s a thing to pin it down and hold tightly in our possession. The truth is that love isn’t something we can own or quantify. It’s even difficult to capture in words or linear thoughts what love truly is. I see love as a deep reservoir that lives inside and among us. We tap into love freely and by choice, even though it doesn’t often feel that way. Love is available to everyone, only - all too often - our lives get in the way of it.

It’s hard to turn toward love when love has left pain in the past. It’s also hard to turn toward love when systems, cultures, and societies suppress love and tout it as weakness. It’s hard to turn toward love when it feels outdated, cliche, or (worse yet) unsuitable for survival.

We can’t, however, deny our physiological responses to love. Whether we like it or not, our bodies and brains are built to respond to the potential for love by pulling us closer into it. The dopamine (excitement), oxytocin (bonding), and vasopressin (long-term commitment) hits to our brains are nature's way of leading us along the path toward love. Sometimes our brains outsmart nature’s system by averting, avoiding, or talking ourselves out of love. More often, however - the giant waves and undercurrents of romance, sex, procreation, admiration and other love-adjacent emotions/experiences swirl so strongly within us that we end washed up on the shore of connection together, waiting for what comes next.

Sometimes what’s next is brutal.

Sometimes it’s really very lovely.

Sometimes it’s boring.

Often, it’s worth it…

…even if only in the long run.

The journey toward love is a vulnerable road for our fragile egos to travel. If you can stomach the small (and large) ego deaths - love is usually worth the trip.

What I’m NOT saying here is that everyone is worth loving. No. It’s martyrism to stay the course of love when it only ever leaves us battered and bruised. This isn’t real love, but the result of sad humans so unfamiliar with love that they mismanage or mislabel their own attempts to turn toward it. Of course, these people deserve love at some point from someone in their lives, but it doesn’t have to be from you. We don’t need to love everyone all of the time. Turning toward love should always feel safe, or at least close enough to safe that you could retreat there easily if need be.

If love feels hard, start by turning toward people easy to love. If that isn’t available, you might start by turning your love toward yourself and going from there. As your muscle for holding peace and safety with love gets stronger, you can start taking more risks and making yourself more vulnerable to its experience. Build up a love army, so to speak. Your love army can catch you when you fall from the graces of love, which will definitely happen at one point or another. This is part of what makes love such a beautifully agonizing human experience. Earth feels hard when our bodies make contact with it from grace.

I know that the sweetness of love is worth the risk of it disappearing, letting me down, or totally blowing up in my face. When I can remember that the stories I harbor around love are only stories, and that the chemical processes of love in my body are simply nature playing it’s ingenious course, I can tap into the realness of love - which is a deep, renewable reservoir of connection, peace, and clarity abound.

Please have a listen to “Feels Like Being In Love” by Wet Leg for a great/fun song about our brain/body responses to human connection :)