On Learning to Love Without Fear

When my marriage of 10 years ended, I knew it was the right choice, in every way. Being one instead of two after fourteen years led to an intense period of figuring out who I was meant to be in absentia of the future I’d planned. I grew up as part of a couple. We met when we were 19 so my adulthood and relationships formed in the shadow of us.

In the year that followed I was left to think about who I was, who I surrounded myself with, and how we all relate to one another. Getting through the darkest times I’d ever wandered left me with a new appreciation for my friends, without whom I’d have been lost. In the beginning stages of healing, my heart opened up. My love for my family deepened, and my love for myself had a chance to blossom for the first time in my life. When the grief began to lift and crack, my daydreams filled with ideas about happiness, sex, love, and relationships.

What is love? How do we express love to others, and who do we express it to? What does it mean to love yourself, to love the people around you? How do we use the love within us to connect with other human beings?

I spent so much time in the decline of my marriage feeling so many unpleasant things — unseen, unworthy, and indescribably unlovable. When it was over, I had to figure out how I wanted to relate to other people in terms of intimacy, love, and attachment. What were my expectations and society’s expectations, where did they come from, and were they acceptable to me? What does it even mean when we give love or have love for one another? I pondered how we share ourselves with each other, or really how we DON’T share ourselves with each other and in that not sharing we limit our experience and joy in life.

Intimacy doesn’t have to mean being in love, and I never understood that before.

Even opening your heart and offering what’s inside doesn’t have to equate to being in love with someone, at least not in the widely accepted sense of ‘in love.’

Before I began this journey, my heart was closed tight. Throughout those last few years, the only way I could find self-preservation was to shut it down. In my explorations of myself and interactions with other people, the lock popped and that shell fell away. Inside, I found joy. I remembered what it was to live without a weight on your shoulders. I literally felt like I was walking on air. I found wonder, amazement, and a whole lot of love.

Moments of feeling like love would explode from my pores were something I’d experienced in the distant past. Different than specific love for a specific person, these moments brought a general sense of well being in the world. I found that warm feeling of happiness again, but also found it could be much more narrow and focused.

In the early months of my newfound single-dom, I had many experiences that surprised me and taught me wonderful things. One afternoon in bed, as we absorbed that fine golden afterglow of connection and pleasure, I looked at a man’s face and I felt love. It was unfamiliar- it didn’t fit the definition society had given me. This was not my husband, or even my boyfriend. It was someone I had known for maybe a month.

Beyond the hormones, the oxytocin, the chemical affection that would fade, I could feel love threatening to overflow me.

Love for life, for myself, for the ability to connect with another person, and for this particular person. My heart was open and beating loud, and I was offering my loving energy to this person because I wanted to, and I because I love giving it. I also found I’d let go of any expectation that he would return the same energy to me. I did get positive energy back, but I was realizing that reciprocity was not necessary. I was a bit startled, but unafraid. It didn’t feel weird, or wrong, or like too much. It just felt like really good, positive energy.

I knew enough about him to know the struggles he had recently faced. I knew that he had opened himself up and shared himself with me. I knew that he had taken care to treat me well, to have compassion for me, and to respect me. And in those moments I did love him. Just not in a way a large percentage of people would understand.

Growing up in our culture, we are given a limited idea about what love is. It’s a feeling that comes in infinite iterations, and by accessing as many of these variations as possible, we can fill the world with them. The journey of finding myself led to the opening of my heart, but beyond that came the opening of my mind.

This world is not black and white. We need to leave the idea of the binary behind. Gay or straight, male or female, married or single. Between those ends there are infinite variations of bisexual, pansexual, asexual, agendered, transgendered, genderflexible, polyamorous, non-monogamous, and on and on and on and on. If you really look, it’s like getting glasses and finally being able to see that there are individual leaves on all the trees.

Paradigm shifts are never easy. Leaving behind years of conditioning is something that can only be done intentionally, because you believe there is a good reason to do so. Realizing that our hearts are limitless isn’t easy. The need to define love, to defend our feelings, to convince each other that there is a big difference between being in love and feeling lovingly towards someone, these are ingrained in us from day one.

When you love big, like I do, that energy can be confusing for people. It often leads to one of two things: it either scares the person on the receiving end because it feels like “too much” and they think something is expected of them; or they are unable to see the distinction between being intimate/loving and being in love/committed/involved in a way that wasn’t agreed upon. What I have been so lucky to discover is that there are other people out there who can accept this energy I have to give, and they can appreciate it, and give back whatever they want to give back without feeling like there is pressure or that there are certain expectations for “where this is going.”

In the midst of my self-discovery, I read The Ethical Slut. It was an integral part of my journey in discovering who I am and how I want to live and to treat the people in my life, there was so much of the book I related to. Reading it made me feel seen. It’s so much about how we interact with other human beings on a base level. I was returned to my basic beliefs about life and values and what we are doing here and how we should behave.

I began to understand that fear rules so much of the world around us. We resist opening up our hearts because we are afraid of rejection and pain. If we work at it, we can let this fear go. For me, it came from realizing that I could not possibly be hurt more than I already had- and I’d survived that. It was hard and painful, and sometimes it still is, but I am still here.

If I like someone more than they like me, and it hurts, I will get through it. If I get my heart broken, I will deal with it and have people to turn to who will comfort me and help me. If I fall in love and it doesn’t work out, that’s just part of relating to other people. It might be a cliche, but truly it is better to love and lose it than never to love at all.

Walking around and deciding NOT to form connections with people because you MIGHT get hurt is such a waste.

It’s like being so afraid of dying that you never leave your house and then end up living a sorry, lonely existence where you’re a shut in and all you think about is how scared you are to move.

Being able to embrace all of the love around me has led to living outside the shadows and leaving fear behind. I will feel love, and I will remember always and forever that I am worthy of being loved, both by other people and by myself. There will be heartache, and longing, and tears. There will be times where I will stumble and momentarily forget how to love myself. But I will find my way. And it will all be absolutely worth it.