We've got love all wrong

We were and are so crazy to limit love to finding your soulmate. There are endless ways to love and be loved.

One of the first things I remember from my childhood was riding in the car with my parents. I was sitting in the back row, but I was on the floor rather than in my seat. I wanted to get as close to my parents as possible, and even the distance of the middle console was too far for me.

I was in the first grade, and my dad was teaching me multiplication with the yellow, pop-up multiplication tables that are undoubtedly seared into every twenty-year-old’s memory. The satisfying click, clack of pressing the numbers intrigued me more than anything else, but if there were anyone who could effectively teach me something, it would be my dad. I would listen to him.

So I pressed number after number as he explained his roundabout way of multiplying numbers that had nothing to do with memorization. And I got it. At seven years old, I got it.

I wrote this moment off as what was expected of parents to teach their children.

When I was in the fourth grade, my two best friends and I were obsessed with each other – awkward stages and all. We schemed and plotted to memorialize this obsession in some form, so we ordered these long, witchlike, admittedly ugly owl necklaces. The pendant was an in-your-face owl that opened up, and on the inside, there was an unevenly cut-out circle of a selfie of the three of us. I had felt proud of this monumental purchase, and it didn’t matter that the necklace clashed with any possible outfit.

I wrote this moment off as a childhood anecdote of weird ten-year-olds.

During my senior year of high school, I started running with the homeless population of Houston. These were people who had always been close to my heart; these were people who were too often written off as less-than-human. I wanted to be with them in the community, so I would wake up at 5 AM, layer myself in cumbersome mismatched layers, and run a three-mile route in the early morning cold. I met people who had been showing up to these runs for years, people who were struggling with addiction, and people who raved about their children.

I wrote this moment off as what my life could have been if I had not been born in the circumstances I was born in.

The thing is that all these accumulated moments of beauty and connection with other people sparked something in me. I just never realized that it was true love.

When I was a little girl, I threw around “I love you” like it was a simple currency. Then, as I grew up, the words became more sacred to me, but I still loved everything – simultaneously easy and hard. It was easy for me to love people and things. It was hard for me to differentiate what was true love because in the back of my mind, true love was only accomplished between boy and girl, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife.

Romantic love was going to be the epitome of my life just like I had seen in the books and movies I stuffed my headspace with. Now, I realize that we’ve got love all wrong.

We’ve been taught over and over that being in a relationship is true love, and that is what’s going to lead to true contentment and happiness. Oh how wrong this is.

I think that God made us to love and be loved, and whether or not you believe in God, I think a lot of people would argue that their life centers around love in some way or another. However, I want to pick at the loose threads that our broken childhoods and surroundings have taught us about our life centering around finding our other half.

In the search for one’s other half, we get lost in finding someone who compliments us rather than completes us. This leads so many of us to never become our own whole person, and that’s why we fall into a depression when someone doesn’t like us back or when we go through a breakup.

For a large chunk of my life, I think I put boys on an altar and unknowingly knelt before them in hopes that they would fill the hole in my life. You can’t rely on a single boy or a multitude of boys to do that for you.

Rather, the hole in your heart is a collection of puncture after puncture from accumulated thorns in your life, and the only way to fill those is to recognize what true love is. True love is God to me. That extends to the way my dad taught me multiplication in the car, the way my fourth-grade best friends flaunted ugly owl necklaces, and the way my homeless friends shared bits and pieces of their life with me.

When we start to realize how love is being known and seen in all its possible expressions – parents, friends, strangers, we can find real contentment and meaning in our lives.