What If Loving Is Dynamic?

To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.

~ Heidi Priebe

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When I have written vows for weddings that I was asked to perform, my favorite has always been: “I commit to loving you exactly as you are, exactly as you are not, and exactly as you will be.”

Of course, when couples decide they like vows such as these, they are very likely not aware that they are speaking into existence and into their relationship a most aspirational standard. It is so very hard to commit to loving someone no matter what … no matter what.

Because we are so very human, each of us has a shadow realm in which lurks our wounds, our fears, our judgments, and our expectations. When we commit to loving no matter what, we assure that that shadow work must come to pass.

We can’t love anyone (or anything) without limitation unless we free ourselves of everything that stands in the way of such loving. And any encounter with most anyone or anything is guaranteed to provide us with data that reflects on each and every place within our shadow selves.

At the same time, there is something so aspirationally beautiful about loving no matter what, that it calls to us even as we do not know or understand the terms.

So how does one go about such an impossibly challenging proposition?

Long ago a mentor in recovery proposed that the only way forward would be to commit ourselves, to make a decision for loving no matter what. And to start by focusing on one person, knowing it would be a lifetime proposition to keep addressing every block within ourselves. So too that it would necessarily extend beyond that one person, because once one begins the process of loving no matter what, it must find its way beyond the one to others, and then to all.

Seeing True in Reality and In Practice™

Why would anyone commit oneself to such a path as loving no matter what?

Because it is what all of us most wish others will offer to us. We want to be seen, known and understood as fully as possible, and loved for and as all of it.

We can’t have it for ourselves without extending to others. And we can’t demonstrate it to others without experiencing if for ourselves.

Perhaps we were created for loving no matter what.