The First Thing Lovers Give Up

"Mostly I am ashamed for sticking around for someone who makes me feel this way."

Mostly we are ashamed for sticking around for someone who makes us feel like we can't trust and we shouldn't love.

It's a really sad thing, becoming less naive. The saddest necessary change you'll ever make in your whole life. Naiveté means trusting. And what does that really mean- when you tell someone, anyone really- that you trust them? Mostly it means, I trust you not to hurt me. We give up a piece of ourselves in the naive hope that they wouldn't accept it if they didn't think they could take care of it. But we need all our pieces to be whole - every single one - just like humanity's humblest or most sophisticated tools. In that, all animals and things are nearly equal. A machine falls apart without all its pieces. And so it is. When we give up a piece of ourselves, we become vulnerable. We achieve nothing but the potential to fall apart. And the more pieces we give up, the more fragile we become.

Or we can restructure, reform. We learn to function without the pieces we've lost. The first piece to go, of course, is our naiveté. It's our willingness to trust, and the ease at which we love.

And isn't that a shame.

How Men and Women Love

I think I finally understand what it means to have guards up. It's a decision. A decision I never knew I had. When you meet someone and plant the seed that is love, you have a choice to make. You can choose to water and care for that seedling, or you can choose to let it die. You can choose to choke its life away, I should say. A strong seedling would need to be killed - it wouldn't die of neglect. It would gather life and energy from wherever it could in its abandonment, and it would grow stronger despite your "will." "Will" - because who would ever want to kill - cut off - the potential for so much beauty. But that is love, or at least its beginnings. I think this is how men experience love, and how jaded women learn to experience love.

The women who don't know better, including a past version of myself, don't know that love is a decision. They don't know the seed is planted, and they don't realize how tenderly they've cared for it. They recall the moment they met their partner with passion - a passion so strong that it rose above the couple involved. There was chemistry, a spark and then violently beautiful fireworks. They speak of love in terms of 'falling,' because they fell and then they are falling. There are no decisions when one is falling - no ways out and no stops. They are in control of absolutely nothing. And so falling in love is thought to be beyond us. It is a fate we can only fight for, not against.

And so, fall with me, the woman's embrace screams.
But what if we can't take care of our seedling, the man whispers, in all of his actions and none of his words.