WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WELL LOVED
Love is a verb. It's something you do, even when the mood ain't the same!! It's a responsibility, an action, a JOB, a duty!! It's a sacrifice! It's learning to step outside of yourself and your own selfishness and seek to understand what drives your partner, what HURTS YOUR PARTNER, what helps them grow, what makes them better, and what makes them feel protected and in the midst of that you build a deeper, stronger bond.
Love is supposed to quiet the noise.
When you're loved well, you stop performing. You stop auditioning. You're given permission to just be you!! Your nervous system softens because you're not always bracing for impact or waiting for the other shoe to drop. You're not decoding mixed signals or wondering where you stand! You just... know.
Being well loved restores dignity. It reminds you that you are worth consistency, honesty, and gentleness. It teaches your heart what safety feels like!!
It heals parts of you that you didn't even realize were injured. The part that learned to over explain or shut down. The part that learned to shrink because you've been told you're "expectations are too high." The part that thought love had to be chased.
It makes you steady.
Being loved well also calls you higher. It makes you WANNA be better and love better in return, or it should. It confronts selfishness, sometimes softly, and sometimessss maybe not so much! But it invites growth. It feels like a knowing that if you fall, your person will be there to catch you.
Don't confuse love with being weak or soft!! It isn't always about being sappy and sweet. Sometimes it's showing up when you're tired of re-hashing the same thing over and over again, with a spirit of understanding. Sometimes it's pain and suffering. Dorothy Day says "love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams"!! In that, I hear someone who sacrifices themselves to love the person who needs you most. Not a lot of people these days even understand this kind of love.
But what happens when you're NOT well loved!? Welllll... in my experience:
You start to question your worth.
You start to accept behavior that you would generally NEVER tolerate.
You may feel lonely even when you're not alone.
You over-explain yourself because you don't feel heard or you walk on eggshells to avoid conflict because the person never HEARS you correctly anyway.
You confuse bread-crumbs of affection with genuine love.
You become anxious, hypervigilant or constantly wait on the next crash out or disappointment.
And the worst... you lose parts of yourself. The part that used to shine, trying to maintain the relationship, until you actually feel empty.
It changes you. It reframes what you used to expect from people and makes you ok to receive bare minimum. You lose sight of your future because you're only trying to survive the week!
The strongest relationships are built on thousands of small moments where one person quietly communicates to the other, "YOU MATTER TO ME. YOUR OPINIONS MATTER TO ME. YOUR DESIRES MATTER TO ME" without them having to ask for it!
Sometimes it's taking their car to gas it up without them having to ask. Sometimes it's PUTTING THE PHONE DOWN! Sometimes it's just a lil love note written on a napkin! Sometimes it's answering the same question for the 5th time so your person can process and gain clarity, without you being rude about it. But it's ALWAYS being reliable, honest/transparent and not making them fear the fall wondering if you will catch them!!!
The sad reality is that many relationships don't end because love disappeared. They end because one person slowly stopped feeling seen, heard and cherished!! They felt overlooked, taken for granted, under valued, unheard/unseen and unimportant when it mattered the most.
The people we love deserve more than JUST WORDS. They deserve our effort. It's not measured in how many times you say it, it's measured in how consistently we make the other person feel safe, respected and deeply treasured. And sometimes that looks like believing in someone when they can't believe in themselves.
But don't get it twisted, because I KNOW someone will read this and say, "oh, my person does this or that, they're not loving me well" when ACTUALLY you're the one that keeps bringing the lies, diarrhea of the mouth, chaos and causing conflict where it shouldn't even exist. If you do not create a space for your person to SHARE their feelings and it turns into a war every time, literally ABOUT FEELINGS, then idk what that is!! But it aint being loved well.
At the end of the day, it's about asking yourself how YOU would want to be treated. If you don't want someone doing hurtful things to you, then DON'T DO IT TO THEM!!! If everyone lived by this standard, the world would be a lot better off!!
❤️CD
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