Some Thoughts on Love

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya

I think a lot about love. I write romance novels, after all. It’s an occupational hazard. But I don’t just think about romantic love. I think about all the ways we give and receive and share and show love. Occupational hazard of going to therapy, perhaps.

I’ve had several people in my life express their love for me lately. People that don’t normally slide into my DMs and texts to say such things. Friends and family. The agree to disagree ones.

In moments like this, I like to whip out my James Baldwin. You know the quote: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, and denial of my humanity, and right to exist.”

I love that quote and will use it to my dying day, but it doesn’t always get at the concrete dynamics of human relationships. Which is to say, it doesn’t always convey the tangible realities of what it means to love someone whose very existence is politicized.

So, here’s one little overthinker’s attempt to do that…

What if I was at your house and one of your friends called me a homophobic slur? What would your love look like then? What if I wasn’t there, and they just used it in casual conversation? Would you call them out? What if the people you supported to make laws did? What would your love look like then?

What if someone came to your neighbor’s house and forcibly removed their children from them? Would you, knowing they were a good person and parent, try to help them? What if your neighbor turned out to be an immigrant, someone who worked hard and helped when you had a flat tire and simply tried to make a good life for their family but didn’t get here through sanctioned channels? What would your love look like then?

The problem is that so many people—generally but also some who specifically profess to love me—think those things can be separated. I love you, they’ll say, but laws and policies and people that threaten your rights or your safety don’t have anything to do with me. I love my neighbor, they’ll say, just as Jesus says, but laws are laws. If they’re treated inhumanely, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.

It does. It does it does it does. It has everything to do with you and the choices you make. If you refuse to see that, you don’t love me, or your neighbor. You love the idea of us in your life, you love the idea of being a loving person. Love is an action verb, not a passive and comfortable state. Love is what you do far more than what you say.

I spent way too much of my life having a loose interpretation of love. I kept people in my life who offered nothing more than a few kind words and the absence of direct abuse. And I spent a lot of time feeling bad because I couldn’t reconcile people who used words of love but didn’t mind that their actions made me feel like shit.

That’s not love. It took a long time, but I know that now.  

If you want to love me, the bar is higher than it used to be. If you don’t, it’s okay. I harbor no ill will. I don’t even hope that you receive back exactly what you put out into the world. Rather, I will hope that the love and empathy and compassion that you profess somehow grows enough to include the most vulnerable and marginalized.

And in case I wasn’t clear, none of this is a demand. You don’t have to love me. I’ll be sad, but for the world more that myself. I’ve learned that I can’t lose what I never really had.