Unconditionally

I’ve loved a lot in my life I daresay. Experienced a lot of different types of loves too.

It started when I was still inside my mothers womb, now that I think about it, that was the very first time I experienced ‘unconditional’ love in this lifetime. If anybody loves me without conditions, it must be my mother. I don’t think my mother could ever be capable of ejecting me out of her life for whatever reason. I am so lucky for that as not all children have that unconditional maternal or paternal love. So I would call this the maternal unconditional love. That’s not to say that my dad doesn’t love me incredibly much because he does but I didn’t grow in my dad’s body for 9 months and so it could never be the same type of connection that I have with my mom. As a child I was extremely affectionate with everyone and was always cuddling up on my mom’s/dad’s lap. Apparently I seem to have lost that uninhibited affection in my older years, which is really quite sad but necessary for survival in this world lol.

As I grew up, I had lots of infatuations towards girls. As I was always quite an intense person, I would imagine whole scenarios in which I would run into that person and they would magically see how cool I was, then proceed to be my girlfriend. This tended to cause a lot of hilarious situations where I’d end up making a fool of myself. These were a lot of fun but also caused me a lot of hurt. I was a girl to start with in this life so my ‘crushes’ always had to be secret with the result of me just sitting in my room, singing love songs to my crush and writing love letters. I am sure I am not alone in that regard. They never found out and I would agonize over it. But the pain and infatuation eventually always faded away and I would find another girl to make the object of my affection.
My first serious puppy love lasted a very long time until that girl moved away and I never saw her anymore.

Then there was no real significant person in my life that I was into; there were the occasional ‘online’ relationships but it was all long-distance and I pretended to be someone I wasn’t (a boy).

It wasn’t until I was 17 that I finally had my first real girlfriend. Oh man, was I crazy about that girl! From the moment I saw her, I thought I loved her. Well, it turned out that it was definitely not love. But being with her, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking of her. All I wanted to do was be with her forever. Until..she one day just dumped me by text. That was it. I had given her cds to listen to and had loaned her money but she wasn’t answering any of my calls. When I finally was able to retrieve my cds, she was there in her bedroom with her new girlfriend mocking me. It was one of the lowest points I ever experienced in ‘Love’ at that point.
I felt ridiculed and betrayed.

At 18, I met my 2nd real girlfriend, for who I ended up moving to America for. That was definitely my first love experience. We ended staying together for almost 4 years. The relationship was not the best. I had fallen out of love by the 2nd year but soldiered on bravely to see if we could work it out. After all, I cared deeply for her (emotionally invested) and her family, they in turn did too.
But it didn’t last, I moved back to Europe and I broke up with her. It then turned out that she had been cheating on me for months with a close friend of ours. That person also moved into our apartment the same day I left for the airport. So I guess you could say that thus far my experiences with love had left me pretty jaded.

While living in Spain, I met S on Myspace (cheesus, who even still remembers that social media site??) and we became very close quite quickly. We eventually met in Dublin in 2006 and became an item right away. With her, I experienced real true love and she was different from all the others. She showed me real intimacy and affection, I guess that we actually learned from each other what it was like to truly be in love but also how to handle the relationship once it’s passed the honeymoon stage. I learned that love requires work. We’ve been together nearly 8 years, with some rough times thrown in the mix.

Something very curious happened in 2011/2012. I was apart from S for the first time in a very long time and I met someone who would for the first time introduce me to true unconditional love. This doesn’t diminish the love I have for S, but the love would prove to be so much more different and impactful. She didn’t reciprocate and at first it turned into unrequited love (you know pining away for someone who you can’t have). Those were excruciating times for me. And instead of the love diminishing, it keeps growing stronger. But through the pain and time, I found that my love for her was turning into pure, unconditional love where it didn’t matter if she loved me back or not. This means that I love that person for exactly who she is, with all her faults, no matter what her actions would be. This person is not in my life anymore for obvious reasons but I still think of her every day and I send her loving thoughts every waking moment. It’s very unfortunate that she doesn’t believe I love her in this way but it doesn’t matter. It will never die.
She unlocked the gate to being able to finally learn to love myself.

Now as you can see..I have not had a lot of relationships. Only 3, but 2 very long ones. S and I will be together for 8 years in May. Sometimes I don’t know how she can put up with me especially being that I have someone in my heart who will never leave from it. I think it means that she loves me unconditionally in turn as she’s never given up on me at any given time. She loved me when I was female all the way through my transition to male. Let me tell you that it’s so remarkable of her to stand by me through all that. And because that love has been in turn unlocked in me, I am able to reciprocate it. There will never be a time where I won’t love S.

It’s funny really because when I was younger, I thought there was only 2 types of love. That of my parents (familial) and being in love (romantic love). However, love has turned out to be so much more complicated and elegant even that I ever could have imagined. I love loving. It makes my heart sing. When I love, it tends to be forever and with all my being. I don’t do butterfly like love, going from this one to that one. There has to be a genuine connection. 

That’s why I think love is the most important thing in the world. If you look at history, it was ultimately acts of pure love that have made the greatest impact on us. The worst times in history were based on acts of pure fear. Hereunder fall the emotions such as anger, envy, greed etc. It’s been scientifically proven that love vibrates at a much higher, quicker rate than fear (http://cafeholistic.com/meditation/emanating-love), which to me makes so much sense. Negative energy can bog you down whereas positive energy brightens up your day.

I am not alone in this love I have for Love. The whole world does revolve around it, all the love songs, movies, books and more. People cannot get enough and are all looking for their ‘soul mate’ or ‘the One’. We stumble through life trying to find it, and along the way we learn different types of love, different types of relationships until we finally one day ‘get’ it. That we cannot love anybody else before we love ourselves unconditionally. In the end, romantic love is desirable yes, but it’s not why we are here I believe. Romantic love can be so limiting; if you do this for me, I will love you but if you say or do something I don’t like, we are surely over. That just can’t be right!

If we all would just love a little more without any conditions, I think the world could be such a beautiful place. But then again, I am just a dreamer..but I am sure that I am not the only one 😉 (see what I did there? Lol).