How I Want to Be Loved is How I Go About Loving You

Loving is an act. Action implies effort and effort takes both time and energy. Time and energy are precious resources and can be hard to find, but finding the time, and summoning up the energy, is always worth it. So long as you are worth it. But if I’m still here, it must mean that you are worth it.

Sometimes I fail in my efforts at loving to the best of my ability because I get distracted, lazy and self-consumed or because I choose to indulge in the ridiculous and false narrative that “I am just so busy!” But I am determined and stubborn by nature, so I know that I will dig deeper next time around. Please pardon me and grace me with your love by granting me that “next time around.”

I try my best to actively listen, even and especially when I feel threatened: with an open heart, with curiosity, with patience and with trust. I don’t have to agree, but I try in earnest to understand your perspective.

I endeavor to show up. I bring you soup when you are sick, take a seat in the audience when you perform, pledge my participation in those events or activities that bring you meaning, defend you when you come under attack and share my congratulations when you achieve an accomplishment.

I aim to remember you: at birthdays, anniversaries and during the holidays. When you are going it alone and even when you are surrounded by a crowd.

I try to honor you with basic rules of civility. By remembering to say such simple things as please and thank you. To ask after you, and to look for ways to help. I try to sweeten the day for you with tiny little gestures. I offer you the seat with the view, the last bite of food on the plate or the one remaining dry beach towel that isn’t damp or coated in sand and sunscreen. I trust that our mutual love will naturally engage in turn taking. And I trust that if I slip up, get greedy and take the bigger half of the cookie, that you will admonish me with humor and forgiveness because you also trust that our mutual love will naturally engage in turn taking.

I struggle with this one, but I try to present you with the gift that you want and not with the gift that I want you to want.

I try to encourage you and to champion you. To prop you up when you need propping and to give you space when you need time alone. To trust in your process, to allow you to make mistakes, to graciously accept your amends, to honor your boundaries and to love your imperfections.

I work hard to be honest with you. To prove that I am trustworthy and a woman of my word. When you are honest with me, then I will trust that you are doing the best you can and I will return that effort by stepping forward with you - even when I feel that your efforts have fallen short of the mark. Why? Because sometimes life demands that we shoot at different targets. And because sometimes it’s my arm that shakes and it’s my quiver that falls short, misfires or veers off freakishly to one side.

There are a million ways to love you. Infinite ways. I could fill the deepest oceans, the vast deserts and the expanding galaxies with all the various expressions of love that I have at my disposal. I just have to see them, and sometimes the capacity to see simply starts with an act of consideration.

And loving, I have come to realize, is born right there: right there in that scrappy little moment of giving of myself in order to consider you. It can be an act that is as small and delicate as a pinprick or as encompassing as an incoming tide.

Regardless of scope, I hope you feel it. And despite how your learned ways of being might or might not instruct you, I hope you lean into it and trust in it and take a long bath in it because, if nothing else, it is yours to take.