Loving Someone Is the Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do
Which is saying a lot since life is hard incarnate.
If you’re like me, you learned much of what you know about love from popular culture. You watched The Little Mermaid where you discovered that people don’t even need to be able to communicate effectively to fall in love. You watched Say Anything and learned that all you needed was a boombox and a trench coat to get the girl. Or maybe you watched music videos that told full love stories in two minutes or less.
Either way, it all looked so easy. And maybe that’s because it was — many movies and music videos only show the early stages of love, anyway.
I think that’s why a movie like Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is so poignant, if not a bit subjective, because it shows the aftermath of love and the struggle to truly love someone enough to make it last past the closing credits.
Characters in movies like Marriage Story, like the couples that disintegrate in real life, take the easy way out. Loving someone isn’t for the faint of heart, hell, it’s not even for the strong of heart most days.
True love is reserved for those of us who are resilient enough to get past the hard times in pursuit of the life changing moments that can only be offered by, you guessed it, the one you love.
Love is a marathon…
…not a sprint. Once you get past the wild west of dating, making the commitment, and discovering all of the strange quirks that your partner skillfully concealed through the courting stages, you discover the slog that characterizes long-term romantic relationships.
You realize that to stay together, you have to work hard to create novel moments, keep things interesting, and drown out the siren call of temptation.
Still, why is loving someone so hard sometimes?
Because…
…your partner is imperfect.
“To err is human...” -Alexander Pope
I learned this the hard way. If you’ve read any of my other articles, you know that I know that being with someone for a long time is….trying.
I was married before, and one of the things that torpedoed that union (among millions of other little torpedoes) was my inability to see my ex-husband as a flawed human being worth loving in spite of an annoying habit, or two.
I would nitpick his every move, his every mistake, his every shortcoming like it was my job without realizing a literal fact: I had imperfections as well. He just loved me enough to not throw each and every one of them in my face.
Loving someone means you come to love, or at the very least accept, that they aren’t the perfect bronze god you thought they were and that they’re putting up with your annoying tendencies, as well.
…love is mostly boring.
There’s an undercurrent of excitement in loving someone, that much is true. But on a daily basis, being in love is a pretty mundane existence.
Over time, love becomes less about making sweeping declarations and passionate make out sessions and more about watching TV, having dinner, monthly date nights (if you’re lucky) and cleaning the house alongside this person that you had this grand love affair with.
You might realize that loving someone amounts to being in a state of content boredom together, day after day.
That’s a hard thing to accept.
Especially if you had a very steamy and exciting beginning. Boredom has been the catalyst for bad decisions for as long as humans have drawn breath on Earth, and that’s not changing.
You must work to ensure that the inevitable bored moments are balanced out by special moments that both of you create to keep things fresh.
Sounds like work. Work is hard.
…it requires sticking it out against all odds.
This might be the hardest thing. Loving someone means that you will inevitably go through some tough life events with them. You will hurt one another. You both will make huge, devastating mistakes. Walking out the door will seem like the sweetest option more times than you can count.
But loving someone means you don’t leave, even when things get hard.
Now for the quintessential disclaimer: the hard times I’m talking about are NOT dangerous things like abuse, negligence, deceit, or infidelity. Love isn’t enough to stick around in the face of those things, and you should leave as soon as you can.
For all of the other types of hard times that couples go through, leaving is not an option. You have to communicate and work to improve the weak spots in your relationship without simply hopping on the next thing smoking.
Loving someone is the hardest thing you will ever do because it’s all a matter of choice. Leaving your lover won’t kill you, it won’t ruin your life (even though it might feel like it for a while) and it won’t devalue you as a person. So, in other words, love isn’t a necessity.
Still, it’s a worthy endeavor.
Loving your partner means you choose to take the bumps and bruises without giving up, and in that way, it’s like every thing worth having in life: you have to work hard to keep it. The only alternative, the easiest alternative, is to give up.
Loving someone is the hardest thing you’ll ever do because love, quite frankly, isn’t for quitters.
