Why do I want to love?

Why do we want to be in romantic relationships? Is it because we want to find our soulmate, our better half? Or maybe because we want to have our happy ending? But what if underneath it all, we don’t want to be alone with ourselves?

In this episode, I'll be sharing stories about love, of how I once understood it, experienced it, and redefined it.

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Logo Art by Ella Apuntar. 

Transcript

Arlan | 0:11
Hello and welcome to My Offering to You. I am your host, Arlan Mendiola. I share my stories and reflections about life, in the hopes that it creates a spark, provides clarity, or even new possibility.

Arlan | 0:30
So let me ask you this. Why do we want to be in romantic relationships? Is it because we want to find our soulmate, our better half? Or maybe because we want to have our happy ending? But what if underneath it all, we don’t want to be alone with ourselves?

Arlan | 0:53
In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing stories about love, of how I once understood it, experienced it, and redefined it. 

Arlan | 1:06
At an early age, I was exposed to a lot of stories about romantic relationships and even true love. That to find your true love, is to find your soulmate. Your better half. That you’re not complete until you find that love. Or that once you find your true love, you will have a happy ending. I would see this message conveyed a lot in the media that I consumed, whether it be through cartoons, movies, or even TV shows.

Arlan | 1:43
I think the most notable TV show that I watched growing up, that conveyed a lot about romantic relationships, was Boy Meets World. The story about Cory Matthews and Topanga Lawrence. Yes, their love was not perfect. There were ups and downs from their teenage years into their college years. But just this notion of being able to meet your love of your life, your true love, during your childhood, was something that I believed I needed to find.

Arlan | 2:18
And I recognize, looking back at my childhood, there were a lot of conflicting messages and emotions I felt. On the one hand, I started to believe that I didn’t deserve to be happy. But on the other hand, there was a part of me that wanted to escape that reality and have my happy ending. I wanted someone to rescue me from being alone with myself and dealing with this pain. And keep in mind, this is essentially 7 to 8 year old me that started to think in this way.

Arlan | 2:59
Now the earliest I could remember having a crush on someone was in kindergarten. I remember one day during recess, I was with my crush underneath one of the playground structures. I can’t recall what game we were playing. All I can remember was talking to her and one of our other friends. And then she asked me if I had seen one of my other friends, who she shared that she had a crush on. And like that, my heart was broken for the first time.

Arlan | 3:39
A few years passed and my all time childhood crush came into my life. She moved into my apartment complex, which was located right across the street from our elementary school. Not long after we became friends and we started to walk to school together. Every morning, she would come up to my apartment door, knock, and ask my mom if I was ready to go. I felt both lucky and overjoyed that I was able to spend that time with her, every morning before school. I even remember admitting to my mom that I had a crush on her. But being the shy kid that I was, I never did anything.

Arlan | 4:25
Then came the summer before 5th grade, where my dad got a new job and we moved to a new city. By that point, her family had moved to a different place too and so I couldn’t have easily told her that I was moving , let alone tell her how I felt. And for context, this was the 90’s. It wouldn’t be until years later, when I was in college, that I found her on Facebook and got into contact with her. I was lucky to have found her, especially back then when social media was barely a thing. But at that point, my feelings for her were just stuck in the past and we were different people in different places in our life. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I did tell her years later that she was my childhood crush.

Arlan | 5:23
From 5th grade to high school, I would continue having crushes on others but never had the courage to do anything about it. Throughout all this time, I still believed that I wasn’t complete. I still didn’t want to be alone with myself.

Arlan | 5:41
During the later part of my college years, I entered into what would be one of the longest romantic relationships I would have. I was inexperienced in what it meant to date, let alone be in a romantic relationship with someone. I even remember asking her one time, “Can you promise to be with me forever?” She replied back, “No, I can’t make a promise like that.” I was scared to be alone with myself. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to find anyone to be with.

Arlan | 6:22
We were together for about 4 years before we broke up. At that time, I was going to graduate school in LA. I went back to the Bay Area for a weekend, where I was going to support one of my friends graduating from college. That night before I had to drive back down to LA, I was talking to her over the phone. We started to get into an argument. One thing led to another and I blurted out, “Let’s just break up then.” And so we did. And to be honest, we were no longer happy.

Arlan | 7:08
The next day, when I was driving back down to LA, that was the longest car drive I ever experienced. 5 hours, breaking down and crying, while driving through the 5. Every minute felt like eternity. Eventually I found myself back in LA, in a studio apartment that I had just moved into. And so, I was all alone. On my own. By myself. No housemates. No partner. Just me.

Arlan | 7:54
I took the next few months as an opportunity to help process everything. About the break up. About the relationship. I started to realize my own shortcomings within the relationship. About my toxic behaviors and actions. I put in the work to understand where that came from and how to be different moving forward. I did this not to pursue a relationship with her again. I did this for me. I took this as an opportunity to examine the kind of love that I want to show, practice, and experience. I finally sat with myself. I faced myself and why I didn’t want to be alone with myself.

Arlan | 8:45
During this time, I was reading two books by bell hooks: All About Love: New Visions and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Here’s one of the passages from All About Love:

Arlan | 9:04
“We all long for loving community. It enhances life’s joy. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

Arlan | 9:32
Reading these books by bell hooks, started to give me language and clarity to describe what I was feeling and what I was running away from. At that point, I believed that the reason that I wanted to be in love, to be in a romantic relationship, was to escape from being alone with myself. Because being alone with myself meant that I wasn’t enough, I wasn’t good enough. But after reading and reflecting, I started to realize that I was thinking in this way and how harmful and toxic it was to continue to think and act on this.

Arlan | 10:19
In the months that followed, I took the time to be there for me. To be present for me, as I tried to make sense of this break up, this period in my life, and how I wanted to move forward. I started to ask myself, “Why do I want to love? What is the kind of love that I want to experience? How do I want to show love?” Through the course of answering these questions, I started to realize the difference between the words “lonely” and “alone”. Of feeling lonely and being alone.

Arlan | 11:08
Lonely. It’s okay for me to feel lonely at times. When I feel lonely, it doesn’t mean that I’m trying to avoid being by myself. Or that I’m trying to run away from me. Instead, it’s this desire to want to connect with others, for friendship, community, and shared humanity.

Arlan | 11:34
Alone. To be alone with myself, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Being alone doesn’t mean that I’m not enough, that I’m not good enough. It’s the opposite. To be alone, is to be in relationship with me. That who I am is enough, is good enough for me. To be alone is to spend time deepening my understanding of who I am. To be alone is to be present for me. After all, one of the longest relationships that I will have in this life, is with myself.

Arlan | 12:28
Having this healthier understanding of me, of what it means to be alone, allowed me to understand more about love. I’m also reminded of another quote from bell hooks:

Arlan | 12:43
“The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”

Arlan | 13:00
Love is not a thing. Love is an action. I can’t go through the motions and passively be in love. I can’t be in love without being critical of my practice of love. To be in love, to practice love, to experience love, I must be active in it.

Arlan | 13:28
That time in my life has been pivotal for me. I’ve been able to strengthen my relationship with myself and become more critical and intentional in how I practice love for myself and for others. When my current partner came into my life, I knew early on how different my experience of loving her would be. So here’s some spoken word about the love that I have right now.

Arlan | 14:06
The love that I have for her is not filling the emptiness within my chest, because there is no emptiness. That instead, the love that I have for her expands my container to love. Adding more depth and dimension. The love that I have for her, adds another flavor to this concoction that is my being. Mixing in with the other flavors of love that I have for myself and for others. The more that I love, the more love there is to share, to give.

Arlan | 14:49
To love her doesn’t mean that I’m running away from being alone with myself. To love her, I must also have a loving relationship with myself. I no longer act blindly in love, running away from me. I act clearly in love, choosing to be with me. Choosing to share myself, my whole being with her.

Arlan | 15:26
Thank you for tuning into My Offering to You. If you resonated with any part of the episode and found value in it, then follow us on Instagram, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Until the next time, this has been Arlan Mendiola, and I’ll catch you, at the next one.