The Truth About Love
Sometimes I think that the truth about intimate love is that there is nothing true about it. We spend years with people who abuse us and who we don't even like. It makes one wonder about love and whether there is anything about love that is truly loving. After all we often spend our lives either looking for love or inside a relationship where we are conflicted about love.
I learned a lot about love over a span of two relationships each of which lasted about ten years. In the first one I was very young when I got married, nineteen to be exact. I started out wishing that someone somewhere would find me and take care of me. I was a needy young person with a lot to learn and very little experience about life, love or all things related to love. I was so injured that all I could think about was finding someone to take care of me. In spite of myself I found that person in the form of another nineteen year old girl. What I remember most about this relationship of ten years was that it was likely the happiest ten years of m life, while on the other hand my second relationship feels like the worse ten years of my life. For whatever reasons I loath the second person I married and likely for some darn good reasons. What I learned most of all was what I did not want in a relationship and that I'd found the least likely candidate for love, someone who had little to no feelings and who I did not like because of his actions.
The interesting part of being in two long relationships was that I figured out what real love felt like, looked like and was like. I realized that any one of us could stay in a relationship for years out of fear and out of need rather than out of wanting to be in it or being truly invested in love. I understood that abuse comes in many different forms and that for ten years of my life I tolerated a person who was not authentic and who I disliked. A person who thought he was better than everyone else with a family around him that thought the same way. The apple as they say did not fall far from the tree. The culmination of that relationship left me dry and without any doubt that I'd never stay in a situation that was that dark and that insane again because the damage that it did was so severe that I am still trying to manage it.
The truth about love is not that there is nothing true about it. I take that back. The truth about love is that if someone loves you and you love them it feels and acts like love and when it does not it simply is not love. Whatever it was that kept me in a horrible relationship could only be summed up as needy and it was about my own fear. Whatever happened in that relationship that was not loving was evident at every turn. I was and still am responsible for allowing all of what happened and all of what injured me and demeaned me. It may be that the person I was with was detached but I allowed him to think it was alright to be detached. It may be that this person made fun of Hispanics but I allowed him and his family to insult my ethnicity without putting a stop to it and by detaching myself from all of them. Instead I went back for more and allowed myself to be insulted repeatedly. Yet what I know today is that I had to learn this lesson clearly and that their bigotry and their hate was not my fault. I had to learn to love myself enough to remove myself from a toxic situation.
The truth about love is that if someone loves you they will "go through the fire for you" and treat you with respect and dignity all the time, not make a mockery of you and what is meaningful to you. The truth about love is that someone who loves you will stick by you even if you are a little off center. The truth about love is that someone who loves you will defend your honor and stand next to you to ensure that you know they have your back. Love is courageous, love is thoughtful, love is abundant and love is forever. When someone really loves you they don't suddenly not love you and walk out on you. When someone loves you they are forgiving and allow you to be who you are, letting your human errors just be attributed to you being human. The truth about love is that there is always truth in love because unlike infatuation love endures the very things that life sometimes hands out. It is imperfect and it is pure. The truth about love is that few people know what real love is and that is what makes it so difficult to be in love.
Elliott Maximo Collazo
I learned a lot about love over a span of two relationships each of which lasted about ten years. In the first one I was very young when I got married, nineteen to be exact. I started out wishing that someone somewhere would find me and take care of me. I was a needy young person with a lot to learn and very little experience about life, love or all things related to love. I was so injured that all I could think about was finding someone to take care of me. In spite of myself I found that person in the form of another nineteen year old girl. What I remember most about this relationship of ten years was that it was likely the happiest ten years of m life, while on the other hand my second relationship feels like the worse ten years of my life. For whatever reasons I loath the second person I married and likely for some darn good reasons. What I learned most of all was what I did not want in a relationship and that I'd found the least likely candidate for love, someone who had little to no feelings and who I did not like because of his actions.
The interesting part of being in two long relationships was that I figured out what real love felt like, looked like and was like. I realized that any one of us could stay in a relationship for years out of fear and out of need rather than out of wanting to be in it or being truly invested in love. I understood that abuse comes in many different forms and that for ten years of my life I tolerated a person who was not authentic and who I disliked. A person who thought he was better than everyone else with a family around him that thought the same way. The apple as they say did not fall far from the tree. The culmination of that relationship left me dry and without any doubt that I'd never stay in a situation that was that dark and that insane again because the damage that it did was so severe that I am still trying to manage it.
The truth about love is not that there is nothing true about it. I take that back. The truth about love is that if someone loves you and you love them it feels and acts like love and when it does not it simply is not love. Whatever it was that kept me in a horrible relationship could only be summed up as needy and it was about my own fear. Whatever happened in that relationship that was not loving was evident at every turn. I was and still am responsible for allowing all of what happened and all of what injured me and demeaned me. It may be that the person I was with was detached but I allowed him to think it was alright to be detached. It may be that this person made fun of Hispanics but I allowed him and his family to insult my ethnicity without putting a stop to it and by detaching myself from all of them. Instead I went back for more and allowed myself to be insulted repeatedly. Yet what I know today is that I had to learn this lesson clearly and that their bigotry and their hate was not my fault. I had to learn to love myself enough to remove myself from a toxic situation.
The truth about love is that if someone loves you they will "go through the fire for you" and treat you with respect and dignity all the time, not make a mockery of you and what is meaningful to you. The truth about love is that someone who loves you will stick by you even if you are a little off center. The truth about love is that someone who loves you will defend your honor and stand next to you to ensure that you know they have your back. Love is courageous, love is thoughtful, love is abundant and love is forever. When someone really loves you they don't suddenly not love you and walk out on you. When someone loves you they are forgiving and allow you to be who you are, letting your human errors just be attributed to you being human. The truth about love is that there is always truth in love because unlike infatuation love endures the very things that life sometimes hands out. It is imperfect and it is pure. The truth about love is that few people know what real love is and that is what makes it so difficult to be in love.
Elliott Maximo Collazo
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