What is love?

So after much thought & deliberation...(dun. dun. DUNNN!) I have come up with my topic for this blog. It intertwines with my "influential person" & I hate to be cliche' but I am choosing someone who influences my life on a day to day basis & that is my lovely boyfriend, Eric. After my last post (the one that began with the Ted Talks post,) it got me and him talking about our individual definitions of what love meant to each of us. His response honestly through me for a loop.

Don't get me wrong here, he and I have a pretty stellar relationship & we are aware that we each have our own love languages (more on this in another post) and learning to speak and communicate our love in a way that the other person understands. (Think a native Italian speaking man in a relationship with a native French speaking woman, both trying to learn the others native tongue in order to communicate effectively with one another, & that is the metaphor behind learning one another's love languages.) Well we have been making an effort to do this but I never once thought we'd have such different ideas about what love is. To understand this, and understand this post, you'll need a little back story.

I did not have a conventional upbringing whatsoever. I am the product of a one night stand between a 16 year old girl & a 22 year old man. Angela (my birth mother) is the product of a broken home where her own mother (what would be my grandmother) kicked her and her two younger brothers out onto the streets when she was just the tender age of 13, because my biological grandmother's boyfriend, at the time, did not like children. To no surprise, my young mother found herself pregnant again by the age of 19 and also became heavily addicted to drugs. So much so, that when I was four years old, my mother locked me and my four month old brother in a room inside our one bedroom trailer while she went out on a three day drug binge. Take that all in for a moment.. an infant and a preschooler were locked away, alone in a room for days on end by their own mother because of addiction.

This was my example of what love was. Not a very great one, huh? Well before we get too depressed here, he and I were found and taken away by police & social services, to eventually be placed in a home with a couple who had tried for 15 years to have children but could not. It was in this home that my adoptive mother, April, showed me, taught me, and filled me with what real love is. She taught me about forgiveness and how to practice it, even when it came to forgiving my birth mother for abandoning us. She taught me how to overcome the pain of the various types of abuse I had experienced at the hands of my birth mother, and her many boyfriends.

I believed that because my own mother chose drugs over me, and never showed up for visitations to get her rights back, that for whatever reason, I wasn't worth loving. I didn't deserve love. I was unplanned, unwanted, and abandoned, all before I even learned how to read. Those kinds of damages can and did destroy my psyche and made me feel like I had to work harder, or be better, or -you fill in the blanks- to be deserving of love. But out of the ashes and rubble, my new mother built me up, piece by piece, teaching me how to cope and overcome these deeply cut wounds. Now I'm 22 and I am finding that the issues I thought I had overcome, still impact me in my everyday life and the ripples touch my relationships to this day. I have a tendency to try to earn the love in my life and when I don't see the results I feel I've worked for, I begin to look to myself to find out what I did wrong. You see, the relationship between mother and child is supposed to be the first relationship where you are exposed unconditional love and when that foundation is broken, when that first, most important relationship is abandoned by the mother, it is the child that is damaged. And greatly so. Fortunately for me, my new mother filled me with so much love that I am now able to look back on my birth mother with sympathy, understanding, forgiveness, and yes, love. Eric, well he has a different story altogether.

He was born the second, and middle child, of two very traditional Italian and Polish devout Catholics. When he was 16, and decided that Catholicism wasn't the religion he believed in there was strife. But even before this, (which he revealed to me in this intimate conversation,) his father never once told him that he was loved until he was 20 years old. "I love you" wasn't said in his home by the men in the family. (He has 2 brothers, no sisters.) And because of this his idea of love is very different than my own. He said to me that family members were met with a firm handshake, whereas in my family, love was overflowing. (Not to say my new family was perfect, but our parents adopted four children from broken, drug-riddled families where the concept of love was not & had to do some serious damage control, as I like to call it. Our mother had a gift for teaching and because of it we grew up knowing that love from her was unconditional and nothing we did or said would ever change that. His family, (which seemed like a "white picket fence" life I'd only ever imagined,) turned out to have deeply scarring issues too. He wasn't taught about love the way that I was. Love to him, was a nice idea, but it wasn't the root of all good things. It was viewed more like the potatoes and less like the steak of a meal; its a nice side dish, but he grew accustomed to not feel a need for love, something which he has never truly experienced. (Personally, I believe his parents and family do love him, but back to the love languages, I feel that there was a certain miscommunication there and he grew up feeling unloved and unwanted, much like I did, but without the constant reassurance that he was, in fact, deeply loved.

Which brings us to our current relationship.. He and I set up a challenge together. He would get out of his comfort zone and try to understand and apply my ideas of what love is to our own relationship in order to, not only help us grow together, but also to test his idea that love is meaningless and is conditional. So, I give you my new and improved personal blog about digging into what love really  is. I plan to write daily (or as much as possible) with examples, and excerpts, and anecdotes from all over (including my own parents, who are marriage counselors and have been together for 32 years now) about what love is.

Responses are welcome and personal ideas about what love has meant to you would be greatly appreciated!