When I was younger I thought love was a talent.
Something you either had or didn’t. Something that came naturally to the right kind of person, the open person, the emotionally available person, the person who had not spent twenty years building a careful architecture of self-sufficiency because self-sufficiency was the strategy that had kept her upright in the years when there was not enough of anything to go around. I thought love was a gift. I had it but I was not always able to give it cleanly, without the residue of all the protecting, without the habit of holding some part of myself back behind the glass where it was safe and the watching-from-behind-glass felt like presence but was not quite.
I know now that love is a practice.
Not a skill you have. A thing you do, every day, badly sometimes and well sometimes, and the doing of it is the whole of it, not the feeling, the feeling is the beginning, the doing is the love. The calling when you do not feel like calling. The showing up in the parking lot. The holding the coat. The soup you cannot quite replicate but make anyway because the making is part of the keeping-alive of something that belongs to both of you. The choosing to reach across the distance that accumulates in long relationships instead of letting the distance settle into furniture.
I learned this late and I am not ashamed of the lateness.
The lateness is just how long it took me to unlearn the protection. To understand that the glass between me and the people I loved most was not keeping me safe from them but keeping me from them, and the difference matters, the difference is the whole of it, and the unlearning required years and a certain willingness to be wrong about something I had believed for a very long time.
I am less protected now. More present.
I get hurt more easily, which sounds like a loss and is actually an arrival. The hurt means something reached me. The hurt means I was in the room instead of watching from behind the glass. I will take the hurt. I will take the reaching and the being reached and the full contact of a life lived from inside the feelings rather than above them.
Everything I know about love I learned late. But I learned it. And I am using it now with everything I have left.
