I found myself four pints down at 12am sitting on a couch talking about love. As one does in their first conversation with someone — whilst bemoaning the concept of dating apps — I started presenting my long-held view of love. At its core, I think love is a simple concept.
Love is the action of choosing your person and committing. As the romantic comedy About Time says, “I’d only give one piece of advice to anyone marrying. We’re all quite similar in the end. We all get old and tell the same tales too many times. But try and marry someone kind.”
In choosing your person, you come to realise that every person is flawed; by our very nature, we are flawed. We can be arrogant, spiteful, fearful, hateful, avoidant, reckless. We all have our little idiosyncrasies and faults, yet we choose to love one another anyway — often because of those little flaws that only you will know.
In a generation addicted to endless choice, yet so gripped by choice paralysis, this is for some a hard task.
There are few questions that truly break that haze of alcohol. But being asked what my biggest trauma in life is, is definitely one of them. What I found so interesting was the accompanying comment — I am so nice that it must be something big.
Yet when I really think about it, I can’t find one. I’ve never had a toxic job, divorced parents, been abused, a bad relationship, a major health scare, or a drug problem. In actuality, I sometimes feel like the meme of the dog wearing a spinning hat.
Yet of course this isn’t really a bad thing. I am just who I am because of my childhood, my family, my friends, and how I view the world — in that life is absurd and the meaning of it is to create your own, so why shouldn’t I be nice to the world? A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
There is a question stuck in my mind: is there guilt in a trauma-free life?
At first it feels absurd to even think that. Why should you feel guilty because other people were damaged and you aren’t? Yet recent events in my life have had me come face to face with someone deeply hurt, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty for what had happened to her.
If I am truthfully honest, it was also frustrating. In a way, my lack of trauma in life created an emotional barrier. I couldn’t quite understand why she was so ruled by her trauma yet so unwilling to talk about her emotions and that her choices were made out of fear and not love. But in the end we accept the love we think we deserve.
Last year, in one of my weaker moments, I rather vigorously forced my views on love and life onto a friend whilst I thought she was in the middle of cocking it up.
I felt the need to because I had become frustrated with what I saw as a simple problem. In the end, my shove worked. But she also had to remind me that my certainty in life was not common.
I think it amounts to a misunderstanding. Love isn’t the hard part at all, trauma is. What people are struggling with, when they think they’re struggling with love, is trauma. It clouds their choices and twists the judgement making one think from a place of fear not love.
In the end, I was too harsh towards my friend. She was right, from her point of view it was scary, whilst for me it seemed like it was the act of simply saying yes day after day. To her it represented a level of hidden trauma I didn’t quite grasp.
I still think love really isn’t that complicated. But actually accepting someone’s flaws, their trauma, their failures, their successes, is the hard part.