Happy Love Day

True Love & Toxic Love: 14 Core Differences

In honor of the day and love that uplifts, heals, and frees the heart.

I was going to write something romantic, but there’s plenty of romantic sentiment elsewhere today.

Awareness is supreme and to be able to really let go and play in a relationship we need awareness. We need understanding and trust.

We often learn the hard way how important those things are though, even if we already know what they are.

Those with hearts often serve as prey to toxic people and behaviors. Always taking it on like we have to for some reason. Rationalizing the mistreatment in some way out of misplaced empathy and wishful thinking.

The ideal love we think we have is shattered by slights and abuses that we don’t even recognize until it’s too late. Maybe we try to hold on to the person who is hurtful and situation that devalues us.

You can’t love a parasite in your body away nor can you love a toxic person, a narcissist, to change. It just feeds and enables them.

So fuck them.

I don’t believe in moral ambiguity when it’s about how human beings should treat each other. This is the simplest and least ambiguous thing there is.

Some people would say that these aren’t positive wishy washy words for the holiday, and I’d say that’s exactly what a toxic person would say. If we see no evil and speak no evil we can’t see their behavior and point them out.

So protect thyself with awareness.

Love can still (always) be experienced. From a different perspective, maybe a weary if not wiser perspective, it can be had though.

The bad experiences take us into the dark, they block us off from real love and try to isolate us. Love is always there though, it doesn’t go anywhere. We can always find it again. It’s found deep within if you can survive your own scars, pain, and sadness.

People who haven’t really been hurt tend to recycle the same old rhetoric that you’ll find love again and it will make everything right. That puts the focus outside the self though, it continues the problem that lead to the hurt first place. It makes it someone else’s responsibility.

And what of the time in between meeting someone else and being alone? Who’s to say that you do meet someone else? Not trying to be a downer as there is a great possibility we will meet someone else yet there’s no guarantees. So you have to get to know yourself, make a friend with yourself. Know your heart and body.

There are no guarantees but we can increase our chances of encountering love again by getting to know ourselves. Healing ourselves. Knowing what we love and what we’re about, tends to attract the same. That’s when we’re most magical, that’s when we meet love when we least expect it but it’s not even the universe’s power that delivers the new experiences. It’s our own. It’s how much we know and love ourselves, and draw others to us who are compatible with our self love.

I think, and this is my experience, what makes everything alright is knowledge. It’s processing what happened and coming out more aware and stronger from it.

Fuck the toxic and abusive people. I don’t mean that spitefully. I mean, they don’t deserve thought or energy. If they’ve hurt us they’ve already taken enough from us.

What is normally a virtue and strength in a healthy relationship, a toxic person will exploit as a weakness and use against us. Especially empathy and the desire for things to be better than they really are.

Empathy and openness make a healthy relationship incredibly strong, but in a toxic relationship they are exploited and leave you feeling exploited and bad about yourself.

A healthy relationship should build us up though. It should honor and exalt our hearts and humanity, not exploit them. The first relationship we have is with ourselves.

There is often little we can do to control how others treat us if they don’t care to care how they treat us. We have all the control in how we treat ourselves and that relationship though.

I could write volumes about the toxic and hurtful experiences I’ve been through, and how I’ve been used at times of vulnerability and naivety. The answer is the same though no matter who we are and what we’ve been through. The only thing that makes it right is the healing we do within. The knowledge and awareness we give to ourselves.

It puts us in a position to love and be loved as a whole not a half. Two wholes make a stronger relationship, like interlocking rings. How do they interlock if they are whole? That’s the magic of real love. Its bonds are powerful and yet it is completely freeing and uplifting.

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