I spent a couple of Sunday’s ago at one of my high school girlfriend’s wedding showers. And although wedding showers usually make me want to get day drunk and give an offiside speech to all the grandmothers about how the bride lost her virginity just to liven things up, the time other women spent making miniature wedding cakes out of Playdough did allow me to reflect on this period of our lives.

Three of my good friends are getting married this year, but they’re all these bizarre species of female who have been in relationship with their fiancés for 7+ years. I treat them like strange little aliens they are.

For the rest of us who find ourselves in stable relationships however, it comes from years of navigating the highs and lows of love, joy, chaos, destruction and heartbreak. For those of us who didn’t find our life partner at 15, we have spent the bulk of the last decade dating, falling in love, falling out of love and watching our partners fall in and out of love with us.

So I sat there, looking at these girls I’ve known for 17 years, reflecting on what it is about us now. What it is about these guys, this moment, and this time that has us all functioning in relationships where others have failed.

It would be too simplistic to reduce it to just the two people in the relationship. We are a product of so much more than just a He + She equation.

It’s more like: He + She + Environment + Age + Timing + Friends + Current Ed Sheeran song playing.

I may not be some 80-year-old woman full of sage wisdom with an entire lifetime of experience under my belt. But in my handful of experience, here is what I have learned about love:

 

1. Love is NOT all you need

We get it Lennon, you were a damn talented man, but you were also so wholly full of shit. I’m sure when hopped up on acid and hallucinating cartoon submarines all of the world’s negativity really did melt away from you. I’m sure in those moments it did seem like life is easy and humans are intrinsically good and as long as you love one another everything is going to be OK.

But I’ve been in love with people, and been lucky enough that most of those people have loved me back. I’ve watched my friends be in love and watched other people love them.

And I’ve watched it all fall apart.

And yes, sometimes life does operate in black and white and you get to reduce this falling apart to one person just really fucking up. But most of the time relationships function in the many shades of grey; we don’t live in an easily polarized world of Hero vs. Villain, Prince vs. Witch, Princess vs. Jackass.

Because most of the time you love the hell out of one another and still have it not work out. Life would be a lot easier if we could just draw out a map or list of where it all went wrong. But perhaps one of the most poignant and adult conclusions you sometimes have to come to is, Just because nothing is wrong, doesn’t make it right.

At the end of the day, the Beatles can say what they want but it’s not all about love. You have to be able to communicate; you have to like each others families. You have to coexist in each others worlds and friendships. You have to be able to battle and scream and fight and then move on without building resentments or holding onto old grudges.

You have to like the way someone chews their food, the way they act when their drunk, the way they travel and they way they behave when nothing is going their way. You have to learn to like each other even when you hate each other.

It may not make for the same catchy love song lyrics, but in this many shades of grey world we live in, love is but one essential factor in a successful relationship.

 

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2. You have no idea how you fall in love I assure you, so don’t limit yourself

Very early on in my life I had this idea of how I fell in love. I mean, I only had a few instances on which to build my opinion but it had always happened in this real storybook ideal way:

Girl meets boy; girl is instantly attracted; girl pines; boy shows interest; girl pretends she never actually liked him in the first place; boy says screw it and starts to pull away; girl panics and draws that poor sap in at the last second.

…You know, a real goddamn Cinderella story.

But it turns out; I didn’t really know myself that well at all.

We spend so long and expend so much effort in trying to know ourselves. We start to see patterns in our own behavior and create lists of what we like and don’t like, characteristics in others we value versus those we could do without.

And then we start judging compatibility based on the presence or absence of these traits.

The problem is, when we do this it becomes very easy to reject or dismiss people because we can’t fit them into our preconceived patterns. We develop rules and limitations for ourselves – we will never date someone younger, someone shorter, or someone who works in finance; we will never meet someone in a bar. We will never date one of our friends, or even a friend of a friend. We hold onto the notion that attraction can’t be built, it’s either there or its not.

The most illogical part of all of this is of course that we reject people because they don’t fit the mold, failing to realize that the mold is what hasn’t been working in the first place.

Sometimes life and love is most beautiful in the unexpected. That feeling of being absolutely sideswiped by someone we never gave any consideration to in the first place. Sometimes chemistry isn’t being struck by lightning but is instead akin to a slow storm brewing.

Sometimes that person in the background you swore you’d never date becomes the only person you ever want to.

Rules are for sports and prison. When it comes to relationships, be a bit of a rebel.

 

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3. Regardless of the nature of a breakup, watching someone move on is a terrible fucking experience.

There’s this widely drawn conclusion that in the war of Dumpee vs. Dumper, there exists this huge power imbalance, and the person doing the dumping naturally gets the better end of the deal and moves on faster.

But here’s the thing about humans. We may have opposable thumbs and consider ourselves the mightiest of all the species, but we are also so full of massive contradictions, flaws and paradoxes. No where is this more obvious than in the sentence popularized by pre-teens and adults alike:

“Just because I don’t want him/here anymore, doesn’t mean I want anyone else to have him/her.”

We are all such horribly prideful people. Sure we enjoy loving someone, but we also get off on someone else loving us.

So the hardest conclusion to come to is that we are completely and totally replaceable. That, as much as we’d like to believe it, our significant others sun does not rise and fall based on our existence.

Human beings are made to withstand loss and heartache. It doesn’t matter how much we cared about someone or how much they cared about us – They will move on, they will forget, and they will replace old memories with new ones.

They will have new favorite songs that make them think of new people, they will change and grow and breathe and laugh and they will do all of these things without you.

And you know what makes it worse: SOCIAL MEDIA! The first time I broke up with a boy I found out he was dating someone else weeks after the relationship started, over a phone call with one of my friends. And that was it. It hurt knowing he had found someone else, but the news was confined to one conversation – one large but quick ripping off of the breakup Band-Aid.

Now you get to find out someone has moved on in small increments, all playing out its course in public forums. You get to see photos and posts and tweets. There is no quick ripping off of the Band-Aid. Instead it’s like a slow death by heart shaped, kissy-faced emoticons aimed at new people.

We bear witness to our own replacement, and to put things simply, it really bloody sucks.

 

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4. Loving someone doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice you make every.damn.day.

Ok so maybe I actually did take this one from a Quote of the Day website.

Most of those websites make me want to vomit butterflies (unless of course I’m going through a breakup, in which case, like everyone else, I throw on a 2001 Dashboard Confessional album and ugly cry to, “Love like you’ve never been hurt before”).

But once and awhile one of those bad boys really resonates with me. In this case, a little gem by Sherman Alexie that goes:

“He loved her, of course, but better than that he chose her, day after day. Choice, that was the thing.”

All of my relationships have ended because I wasn’t prepared to fight for anything. I was too young and too egotistical to think I couldn’t find something or someone else. I was a wandering soul and I wanted to soak up as many experiences and human connections as I could. I didn’t want to fight. I wanted to run.

I am not a firm believer in this whole marriage thing people keep pitching me on, but that has nothing to do with the example that has been set for me by my parents.

I have zero comprehension of what it must take to make a 37-year marriage last, but I do think it must mean that when you stand up on that alter and say, “I Do” you’d better not just be concentrating on the, “For better” part.

Let’s be honest, for most of us in our twenties and early 30s, we have yet to really have to fight for anything. Sure some of us have worked our asses off in school and continue to do so in our careers, but the real fights haven’t started yet.

Life is hard and relationships don’t always make it easier. Think of how much you’ve changed in the last decade. Now think of how much you’ll probably change in the next decade, and the decade after that.

You’re going to change dramatically and so is that other person and there are no guarantees you’re going to change in the same ways or in the same time scale. You’re going to grow at different rates and sometimes you’re going to grow apart. You’re going to be busier than you ever thought you could be and more tired than you even thought possible. You’re going to have all the romance and desire stripped away from your relationship at times, and you’ll have to wade through the muck to get back to it.

The beautiful end game is that if you last, if you choose each other over and over again, if you don’t get lost in the muck, then what you’re left with is an actual partner; a human extension of yourself. This other person who sees you for all your flaws and idiosyncrasies and late-night eating habits and still chooses you over all the other humans.

But if you’re not prepared for the worst- if you just love and don’t choose- life’s going to seem a whole lots longer and a whole lot harder than you’re probably prepared for.

 

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5. If you set someone free, they’re probably not going to come back to you, but that’s no excuse not to do it.

It is one of life’s greatest truisms that we are at times ruled by fear. In relationships this presents itself as an all-consuming idea that if we walk away from someone, they will move on, fall out of love and find someone else.

We let this rule us to the point that we keep strings attached, text when we shouldn’t text, late night booty call when we definitely shouldn’t late night booty call, post quotes and update our Facebook statuses in ways that are clearly aimed at that person.

We drop crumbs like Hansel and send out these small, almost invisible fishing lures trying to keep that person close enough that they find it impossible to move on.

It is cruel for both parties, and love at its most selfish and immature. It extends breakups and builds resentments. In the process you probably drag other well-meaning people into your bullshit. You break and squash and burn each other until there is nothing left to go back to – just an overall numbness where tenderness used to be.

Growing up comes with recognition that there are different kinds of love. The selfish kind of love is when you decide you only love someone when they are yours, when they “belong” to you. This is the kind of love that needs lures and breadcrumbs, because you feel like that love doesn’t exist unless they are near you.

If you can get past this point, you can let yourself delve into the real kind of love. Love at its most kind and selfless is the idea that you love this human regardless of time, of where they are and who they are with. An idea that you love them for everything they brought to your life and everything they are leaving you with. The idea that you may never see or know that person again, but a part of you will always love them just for what they meant to you once. This is the kind of love that doesn’t begin and end with a title.

If you can learn to offer love like that, if you can concentrate on the lesson and not the hurt, then all that fear just disappears.

Because maybe, just maybe, that’s the way that other person loved us too. And that, when we lie our heads down at night, there’s someone, somewhere, wishing us the very best.

 

E.