The Identity of Love
I'm afraid all my rambling probably runs together after a while. I think I've hit something somewhat new, but it's obviously got overlap with several other posts I've written.
Love languages. They've been discussed before, and they've come up repeatedly near me lately. So I'm putting some thought into what mine are without the quiz categories to draw little boxes around it.
Because my love languages are all based on one underlying assumption - Real love is always conditional upon exactly one thing, no more, no less: IDENTITY.
Take a look at the story of Freya and Od. If you go with my UPG that Od is Odin pre-sacrifice, the reason Od was lost to Freya is that the sacrifice changed who He was so completely that Od was simply gone. Not there. Freya has certainly come to love Odin, but Her love for Odin is as a sepparate being.
My love for any given person is dependant on them being who they are. My love for my boyfriend is not transferrable. If I came home one day and discovered him to be a drastically different person than I knew him to be, I may not love the person I came home to.
But my love for him, now that I have it, is not something he needs to earn day to day. I'd certainly be less passionate about him if he turned into an asshole, but that's not a single-trigger thing. I don't hold or withhold my love based on what he says or does. I may withold my approval, I may withhold encouragement, I may even break up with him. I may, as a result of these things, withhold the expression of love. But I cannot hold back the tides of my heart as they flow, and if I am forced to break up with someone I love, it is not because I stopped loving them.
I still love everyone I have ever loved. I may no longer be actively passionate about them, but I doubt I will ever stop loving them entirely. Once you matter to me, you matter forever, even if I have to force myself to leave you. Because the you I fell in love with is still there in my heart somewhere, even if I never see them again, even if they are no longer a part of you.
As I've said in a previous post - love isn't enough to make me stay in a bad situation. Love doesn't solve problems on it's own. Love doesn't have strings attached to it, though it is often associated with many things that do via the expression of love.
So here's how that whole Identity thing connects with my love language:
If I love you, I want you to know me, and I want to know you. I express my love for you by spending time getting to know you and talking to you so that you will get to know me. I experience love from you by your trusting enough to show me who you are, by your expressing a desire to spend time with me so that we can know eachother better, and by acts of service and gifts that demonstrate how well you know me.
If you give me acts of service or gifts that prove that you aren't paying attention to who I am when I have reason to believe you would know better, I feel less loved. The effort and expense are secondary to the demonstration of connection to my identity. That's why my primary love languages are Time and Conversation - because those are the methods of expression that connect most directly to that knowledge of identity.
--Ember--
Love languages. They've been discussed before, and they've come up repeatedly near me lately. So I'm putting some thought into what mine are without the quiz categories to draw little boxes around it.
Because my love languages are all based on one underlying assumption - Real love is always conditional upon exactly one thing, no more, no less: IDENTITY.
Take a look at the story of Freya and Od. If you go with my UPG that Od is Odin pre-sacrifice, the reason Od was lost to Freya is that the sacrifice changed who He was so completely that Od was simply gone. Not there. Freya has certainly come to love Odin, but Her love for Odin is as a sepparate being.
My love for any given person is dependant on them being who they are. My love for my boyfriend is not transferrable. If I came home one day and discovered him to be a drastically different person than I knew him to be, I may not love the person I came home to.
But my love for him, now that I have it, is not something he needs to earn day to day. I'd certainly be less passionate about him if he turned into an asshole, but that's not a single-trigger thing. I don't hold or withhold my love based on what he says or does. I may withold my approval, I may withhold encouragement, I may even break up with him. I may, as a result of these things, withhold the expression of love. But I cannot hold back the tides of my heart as they flow, and if I am forced to break up with someone I love, it is not because I stopped loving them.
I still love everyone I have ever loved. I may no longer be actively passionate about them, but I doubt I will ever stop loving them entirely. Once you matter to me, you matter forever, even if I have to force myself to leave you. Because the you I fell in love with is still there in my heart somewhere, even if I never see them again, even if they are no longer a part of you.
As I've said in a previous post - love isn't enough to make me stay in a bad situation. Love doesn't solve problems on it's own. Love doesn't have strings attached to it, though it is often associated with many things that do via the expression of love.
So here's how that whole Identity thing connects with my love language:
If I love you, I want you to know me, and I want to know you. I express my love for you by spending time getting to know you and talking to you so that you will get to know me. I experience love from you by your trusting enough to show me who you are, by your expressing a desire to spend time with me so that we can know eachother better, and by acts of service and gifts that demonstrate how well you know me.
If you give me acts of service or gifts that prove that you aren't paying attention to who I am when I have reason to believe you would know better, I feel less loved. The effort and expense are secondary to the demonstration of connection to my identity. That's why my primary love languages are Time and Conversation - because those are the methods of expression that connect most directly to that knowledge of identity.
--Ember--