mf

Saw this tumblr post a while ago. I don't want to link to it; in fact I don't even know if it's still up; but here is a screencap:





So, love and respect are two different things.

But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time (like, that screencap is from early September) and the thing is, I know that "love and respect are two different things" are empty words to anyone who doesn’t already feel that way. You can spend actual literal years in therapy (true story) before getting to the point where you grasp that deserving unconditional love, and deserving respect/admiration/courtesy/other, are separate things. And it’s hard to explain.

I was raised by people who tended to act like they cared about me when I was making them happy. I made them happy when I looked and acted the way they wanted, and what they wanted was someone perceptive, beautiful, mature, clever, who is liked and admired by other people. So for a long time I thought that love was something you got in exchange for being special in the right way at the right time. In other words, I thought of it as a contract.

Most of the rage I felt in my early twenties was about the fact that this tacit contract was being broken. I did my best to be the person my parents wanted, but they kept reacting in arbitrary ways. And I was enraged, because I’d done my part. Why didn’t they care about me in return? I had fulfilled my part of the contract, my 25-year-old mind thought, so why didn’t they? I was consumed by rage and that was all I thought about; it was all I discussed with my therapist at the time.

It took years before I got to the point of reconsidering the original contract. Years before I took a good, long look at the dynamic between my parents and myself, and realized that it is unfair for love to only exist in exchange for behaviour control. I’ll be honest: the words “unconditional love” still make me think that sounds fake, but okay, but mostly my rational self gets the idea: people who genuinely love me won’t stop loving me if I play out of tune sometimes, or if I spend an entire month without saying a single witty thing, or if I write something embarrassing, or if I act like a dumbass. If I do something that warrants it, they may act differently towards me. They may admire me less, respect me less; they may be discourteous. But that isn’t the same as denying love.

Another way to think about it is: it’s like when you compete for something. Imagine a 12-year-old in a dance competition. The emotionally healthy thing is for the result of the competition to have no impact whatever on the love of her parents or guardians. That’s what unconditional love means.

Why did I go through my whole personal history to get to the point: I keep thinking about how my 25-year-old self would absolutely never have understood that writing the original post is an act of violence. I would never have understood that, to anyone who has ever reblogged a “you are loved!” post, this post sounds like “fuck you and your love.” And I guess part of me wants to say: I get it. I get it, but also, OP, look into therapy.