Choose ‘love’, every day!
Passive love is no love at all. I once made the mistake of being in a relationship with a woman without actively wanting to be with her for the whole stretch of it. I stayed with her and I thought I was doing her a favor by doing so, but in reality, I was hurting her more and more the longer that we stayed together. It hurt her because I only stayed with her because I felt like I had to be there; not because I wanted to be there. And that’s where the big difference lay. When you love someone, you have to choose to love that person every day. You have to want to love that person every day that you’re together. Because otherwise, it’s not real love.
I thought that I wanted to be with her forever. At least, that’s how things started out. I chose to date her. I chose to get close to her. And I chose to fall in love with her. She was amazing. She was everything I could have ever wanted in a woman. She was attractive, smart, witty, funny, and ambitious. She had an aura about her that just sucked me in. I was hooked very early on. She was beautiful and I just couldn’t get enough of her. I loved getting the chance to wake up next to her every single morning. I was in love with her. I was passionate about her.
And then, life started to happen. And we all know how tough life can be on all of us. It doesn’t discriminate between the sinner and the saints. And unfortunately, our relationship wasn’t immune to the realities that life had to offer. We were ignorant and naГЇve. We thought that falling in love was enough and we had no more work to do from thereon out. But we were in for a rude awakening. The challenges in our relationship started to present themselves. Loving her wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Sustaining the relationship felt more like a burden and a chore than an actual blessing. And it was that kind of mindset that led me to treating her the way that she didn’t deserve to be treated. I started feeling compelled to be in the relationship as opposed to feeling like I wanted to be in the relationship. And that’s where all the heavy problems really started to stem from.
The months wore on. And I was passively participating in the relationship without ever really wanting to be a part of it at that point. I wasn’t choosing to be with her every day. I was just there and I wasn’t exactly making an effort to stay nor was I getting up to go anywhere. It was as if my presence in her life was purely incidental. And suddenly, the months turned into years. But the problems never stopped. The magic never came back. The joy and fulfilment was hard to find.
I was there like a fly on the wall of our own relationship. But I wasn’t there by choice. Rather, I was there out of convenience, cowardice, and coercion. I didn’t really choose to love her. And because of that, the both of us ended up suffering a great deal.
If I had made it a point to actually choose to love her, then that would have meant seeing whatever time we had together as gifts given to us by life. I would have grabbed at any opportunity to bring us closer to one another. I would have been more appreciative of her presence in my life and I would have done whatever I could do in my power to make sure that she knew that. If I had chosen to love her, then I would have actually put in the effort to fight for that love. And she would have seen that and it would have made her feel important and valued.
But instead, what she saw was something else entirely. She saw a man who was just there. She saw a man who stayed with her out of a sense of pity and duty. And it broke her heart.
I may not have left her in a physical sense, but I had already emotionally abandoned her. I made her feel alone even though we spent lots of time together. It was like I was hearing her, but I wasn’t actually listening; and she knew that. It was only a matter of time before we both decided to call it quits. And by then, we knew we had wasted so much of our time together. True love is a choice. It’s not just some feeling. It’s something that you choose to do every day that you’re with someone. And if you fail to recognize that, then it isn’t true love.
