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April 24, 2016

An Existential Kind of Love.

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“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.” ~ Roman Payne

There are many of us out there, and we often catch a bad rap.

We are the ones who flee from tradition.

We are the ones who will hold onto our freedom at all costs.

We are the ones who willingly choose loneliness over being caged. We are the next generation of existential lovers.

We may be unfairly tagged as “emotionally unavailable.” We flee the minute we feel another suffocating us.

We wrestle with our desire for connection, while also being unwilling to make connection the end game or the pivot point of our lives.

It’s not that we don’t value love and relationship, but we value our freedom more.

The notion that we must follow a prescribed set of social rules of what we are supposed to do and how we are to do it feels like a death sentence. We don’t believe that “first comes love, and then comes marriage.”

We believe that the best relationships happen when people retain their freedom. We seek not to possess or be possessed. We do not believe that relationships are something within which we can hide from the world. We believe it is far better for two people who have equally rich and exciting lives to come together and maintain those lives, rather than melding into one indistinguishable entity.

We don’t believe romantic relationships are about gaining power over another, and we refuse to become the “dragon guarding our golden hoard” that Neitzche described.

We realize that romantic love is, like all things, temporal, and we do not try to force it into a forever mold. We take an honest look at relationships and realize that “happily ever after” is the exception, not the rule. We know that just because something doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean it’s less valuable. We know that, much like a fistful of sand, the more we squeeze, the faster it slips away—so we release our grip.

Because we acknowledge that nothing will last forever, we strive to be present in the now.

We love ourselves first, and create relationships with others out of the overflow. We have worked hard to let go of our projections and unreasonable expectations, and seek only to encounter another person as they are.

We are far from perfect, but we are unwavering in our commitment to self-growth and awareness.

We don’t expect you to fill a void in our lives and we don’t expect to fill a void in yours.

We strive to be responsible with our freedom, so if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that we will be honest. We will tell you the truth, even when it’s hard to say and hear, because we believe in your freedom to choose as much as our own.

We offer to those we love the most valuable gift we can: a love given freely, without expectations or conditions. We endeavor to love for the sake of love, and we are willing to risk jumping into the unknown.

We live this way because we believe that love is best when it’s intricately tied to freedom. In that freedom, we offer and receive the space necessary for growth—for ourselves, and for those we love.

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Relephant Read:

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride. ~ Pablo Neruda.

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Author: Lisa Vallejos, PhD

Editor: Toby Israel

Image: Pexels

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