What love is NOT - Abuse

When I asked my step-mother of more than 30 years what love was, she replied "All love is, is meeting each others needs."

When two people meet and find love, they enter into an exchange. It isn't a demand, it isn't bribery or force, it is a willing exchange. I meet your needs and you meet mine and thus we enter into a relationship.

Any relationship is give and take, and ideally that give and take remains balanced between the two partners. Sometimes you win, sometimes I win, but in the end we balance out.

If one partner receives most of the benefits, but takes little responsibility for ensuring equality, the relationship as a whole becomes unbalanced. While situations may arise when one partner can't give as much to the relationship as the other, overall it should balance out.

Love and money have a lot in common in that regard. When one partner is doing all of the taking and the other is doing all of the giving, it is like writing checks on a bank account without making regular deposits, eventually the giving partner is going to run out of things to give.

The easy answer is to be sure you are making regular deposits to even things out, but many people instead run the account into the red, and decide the only answer is to open a new account elsewhere. It solves the temporary problem, but it doesn't solve the overall condition.

If you are taking more than you are giving you are eventually going to suck the other person dry. If you are giving more than you are receiving you will eventually wear yourself out. Either way, it isn't really a relationship because a relationship implies an exchange.

And it most certainly is not love...

I do believe that unconditional love is possible, but there is a huge difference between loving someone unconditionally and accepting their negative behaviors. When we accept, we relinquish power over a situation.

If someone we love calls us horrible names, we have a right to stand up and say I deserve better. Yet many of us just accept it as part of the overall process of love. Love is supposed to hurt, popular culture tells us so, and therefore we just accept it.

We don't have to!

By accepting we are giving permission for future actions to imitate or even grow beyond that hurt. While it may not be a huge deal when someone we love says something hurtful, when we fail to take action we consent to an escalation of that activity.

Abuse is a cycle, when we see a friend or a neighbor involved in an abusive relationship, we wonder how they allowed themselves to become involved in the relationship in the first place. It did not begin as outright abuse, it began with small things that led to bigger things.

When the abused partner finally sees things as they really are it is too late. They ignored or accepted all of the little signs and grew accustomed to the smaller forms of abuse. By the time they realized how bad things really were it was too late to do anything about it.

The only way to stop it is to accept nothing less than respect at all times.

Love and disrespect cannot coexist, when you love someone the last thing you want to do is to hurt them, but those with a distorted view of love tend to accept disrespect as just another part of love.

A lot of people have confused control with love, if I control them it is because I love them, if they control me it is because they love me. That kind of relationship is many things, but love is not a part of that.

People spend their lives building up fantasies, this is how my life will be, this is how my partner will act, this is how my children will behave.

Some people get so bound up in those fantasies that they fail to leave room for reality. The moment the object of their affection steps outside of the fantasies, the need to control them, to pull them back inside of those fantasies becomes almost an obsession.

This is true of nearly all serial killers, they kill to preserve the fantasy but what of abusive partners? When do abusive partners hit? When do they use their words to harm? When someone fails to live up to their fantasy, they do whatever it takes to maintain that illusion of control.

Some have affairs, some hit, some demean, and some throw temper-tantrums like a five year old child.

What they don't realize is that control will always be an illusion, that's why they have to struggle so hard to hold on to it.

Someone who is in control of their own life will never feel the need to seek control of others, and will never even come close to the reality of love, love is never forced but given.

Nobody likes taking the blame when things go wrong, but some have taken the art of shifting blame to a whole new level. No matter what happens it is never their fault. Someone else is always to blame. They see this as another form of control, but in reality it is anything but.

Trying to maintain the illusion of perfection is hard work, because in reality none of us are perfect. I wasn't always willing to take the blame for things that went wrong in my life either, it was so much easier to blame the other person...

The problem is while I was maintaining that illusion of control, I was handing control of my life over to others. When I finally began to allow myself to see both my failures and my successes as my own, I finally began to gain control over my life.

I fail quite often, but I can take responsibility for those failures and work to correct them. I can even learn from them and avoid similar failures in the future, but I must be willing to accept that I was the cause of those failures not some outside force.

Yet we see it often in relationships, one partner blaming the other for everything that goes wrong. When a friend expressed her sorrow at our failure to give her a birthday party I sought to correct it, another important person in her life commented "Boo Hoo, you never wanted a party before."

It wasn't their fault they failed her, it was somehow hers for wanting something in the first place. Can you imagine living in a relationship where the very act of wanting is a failure on your part?

I took responsibility for it, the other person just shifted the blame. The thing is, my relationship with my friend is important to me, and I will do whatever it takes to maintain it. If that means admitting I let her down and going out of my way to correct it, I will do so.

The other person in her life is supposed to love her more than I do, yet very rarely have I seen them seek to take responsibility for hurting her, and when they do attempt to correct it it is always halfhearted and designed less to heal her pain, and more to maintain their illusion of control over the situation.

The person you love is not there to pass blame onto, love and blame have nothing to do with one another, love is personal responsibility.

We all accept the common equation that 1+1=2, it's a mathematical fact that can't be denied. Yet some have their math all messed up when it comes to relationships, they seem to believe that 1+1=1. What kind of relationship begins with the requirement that when we entered into it, we ceased to exist apart from one another?

I will always be me, and you will always be you. If I begin to take things away from you just because I have entered into a relationship with you then you cease to be the person I entered into a relationship with in the first place.

Relationships are about adding to the live of another person, not taking away from them. When they are more successful than I, I do not take that success away from them, but rejoice with them, but not everyone sees it that way.

Some see the success of others as a reflection of their failure. Instead of seeking their own successes, they attempt to push others down to a lower level. Instead of going out and seeking a higher paying job, they criticize the job their partner has. Instead of earning their own awards, the criticize their partners ability to earn one.

They seem to believe that the only way they can be successful is by preventing the person they love from becoming a success. That isn't a relationship, it is a competition, but it sure doesn't have anything to do with love.

There is one way that altered math does work, when someone I love succeeds with my support I have succeeded as well. When someone I love has failed, I have failed as well and must try harder, just ask luvmyludwig.

She and I have never met, yet we have a strong friendship. At times we are technically competing with one another but we are always supporting each other. If she succeeds where I did not, then it is still my success because she is a friend and seeing her succeed brings me happiness.

That is what a relationship is supposed to be, uplifting, encouraging, building up. Neither of us subtracts anything from the relationship, but are continually adding to it. Should we not require the same of those we live with?

We all have our own definitions of what love is and what it is not, but some things should always hold true. Love does not punish others, love does not withold itself, and love does not hit.

Popular media has done its best to convince us that love is supposed to hurt, that is how we know it is love. Love does require sacrifice, but that sacrifice should always be a choice. Love does require giving up some of ourselves, but it should never be total. Love does allow two people to become one, but should never make one partner disappear completely.

Love is many things to many people, but it should always begin and end with respect. If you are getting anything less from your relationships, then it is not love.

You deserve better.