Love is a 4-Letter word
“Falling in love was my biggest mistake. I wish it never came around.” 💔
I ran across this post, complete with its descriptive emoji, on social media this morning. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard in a variety of forms and coached around a zillion times. You’ll notice that this broken-hearted poster didn’t reference a partner or person, but love. Falling in love was their biggest mistake. Love was the culprit--the thing that hurt, betrayed, or disappointed them. Love was the source of their heart break. Love in this moment was PAIN.
Another 4-letter word I see or hear associated with love a lot is RARE. Even Jennifer Lopez, speaking of her reconnect with Ben Affleck (pre-divorce) stated, “What we learned from the last time is that: love, when you’re lucky enough to find it, is so sacred and rare…”
HARD, LACK, HARM, WORK, BLUE, ACHE, BURN, are also four-letter adjectives I’ve heard friends and clients relate to love. I get it because our experiences and history with love colors how we think about it, interact with it, seek, or avoid it. So, it’s not surprising that our love lexicon is full of negative descriptors. And no matter what your history is with it, love is the one thing we all crave and yet, understand the least. And whether we see it as negative or positive, there is that four letter word we all, at some point in our lives, associate with love—FEAR. Fear that it will hurt us. Fear that we will lose it. Fear that we’ll never find it.
Fear’s Impact on Love
The fear of love impacts your relationship, romantic or otherwise, in ways you may not even be consciously aware of. It reveals itself in behaviors like:
· People pleasing
· Self-doubt
· Sabotaging behavior (i.e., cheating)
· Ghosting
· Jealousy
· Being afraid to be yourself and fully expressed
· Settling for less than you deserve
· Avoiding love and commitment
It can also show up as overcompensating or an inflated sense of entitlement. Bottom line: The fear of love makes it impossible to find and maintain the lasting and fulfilling relationship you crave.
It’s Not Love You Fear
But let’s be clear, it’s not love that you fear. It’s not love that causes you pain, betrays, or disappoints you. It’s the idea of NOT BEING LOVED that scares you. This is a critical distinction because you can always work through the unfaithfulness, the rejection, or whatever pain you’re experiencing, but when you stop being open to love because you are afraid of being hurt, you shut down the very purpose for your existence in this world. You are here to share, enjoy, learn, and grow from love in all its various forms.
I say this with a conviction earned through a lifetime of falling in love (there’s a reason I call myself a love connoisseur). I’ve lived many loving eras in my life—Soft and Easy, Soulmate, Love Beyond the Boundaries, Loved and Betrayed. Each had its own delights and disenchantments. The delights kept me willing and wanting to love and be loved, but it was the disenchanting times, the shitty as hell times, the ones that left the fissures on my heart, well those were the ones that feel most valuable because they helped me grow the most. And in the alone times between relationships, it was love that healed my heart, helped me fall more deeply in love with myself, and set me up for the next great loving adventure.
The Love We Know the Least
Interestingly, the 4-letter word we associate least with love, the kind of love that is most important and is the basis of all true and enduring love is SELF. Interesting, but not surprising. From day one, we start chasing love from others. Yes, familial love for sure, but it’s the romantic love we see all around us on television and movies and read in books. It’s the one version of love we grow up and go out in search of. We can spend years—hell, a lifetime for some of us—chasing love from someone else, while not giving any time or thought to cultivating love of ourselves.
Fall In Love with You
But not falling in love with yourself in a real and soulful way negatively impacts your sense of self-worth, deservedness, and your ability to give and receive the very thing you hunger for. So, whatever your 4-letter word for love is now, know that with some understanding and time, this truth will become transparently clear: LOVE will not and cannot hurt you.
Learn to love yourself truly and you will be able to love others fearlessly.
