things my partner does that make me feel loved

love is a verb and I am a leo

I’m a big believer than love is a verb; bell hooks taught me that in All About Love. The fallacy that love is a magical feeling that overtakes you and should stay for however long you decide to be in a relationship regardless of effort reads from the same script as A Princess Must Be Saved: the movie. Relationships of all kinds: familial, platonic, work, romantic must be nurtured. The love you may feel like a lightning bolt at the beginning of a relationship is something different to what you feel 2, 4, or 7 years into one, but both are connected. I honestly think we know nothing about the truth of love, in part because it has been defined and typecast by centuries of patriarchal stories and simplified myths, and I think we enjoy the idea of “romance” so much that we have become utterly passive (as Penn Badgely recently described it) when it comes to the responsibilities of our relationships. I’m sure there are probably cultures and people who do love beautifully, but I am yet to discover them.
Even though I believe love is a verb, I also – like Penn – don’t agree with those that say love is, or should be “hard work” as many people put it. I don’t resonate with the idea of “work” (though I can understand why others’ might), when it comes to love because it implies a transactional dynamic, a labour. I get why it may feel like work sometimes, but to me it’s much more of a practice. Maybe it becomes hard work when the practice hasn’t been a priority.

The depictions of love that have been conditioned into us are almost entirely hetero and involve a gendered power dynamic and gendered expectations. That’s why it’s always really helped me to look at my friendships for how I expect love to show up in my life; friendships are less heavy with expectation – both gendered or otherwise –there is no way that movies have told me my friend should appreciate me, but I have seen a million scenes where a man brings his girlfriend roses and jewellery. There is no script for where my life “should” go with my friendships – unlike the hetero house, marriage and kids script that has been served to me since I was a toddler – and I wonder if that allows us to move through our love for each other unshackled to expectations and therefore goals. Love in my friendships is nourishing, vulnerable, fun, beautiful, committed and human; how I always wanted my romantic relationships to be. And my friendships are so meaningful because we make an effort. I want my best friend to now how loved she is, or when I’m thinking of her. I want to celebrate her, make her feel seen. I contact her often because I don’t want our friendship to deteriorate because I live away. When we disagree or things go wrong, we talk it out until we feel okay again. I nurture it. The idea of romance and love as we see it represented encourages us to disregard this responsibility because it convinces us that love is some magical force that exists on its own timeline; visiting and departing as it pleases. This is a patriarchal myth; and if we had to drill down into it, i’d put money on the fact that it was a scarcity mentality constructed as messaging to make women in nuclear families obedient (but thats for another post).

I’ve been in my relationship for almost twelve years. My partner is my favourite person, and if you take my description of friendship above, my relationship with him looks exactly the same as that, the only addition being a healthy, fun and fulfilling sex life, which is also something you cultivate. We don’t have kids, but I have a lot of belief that if we did, we’d be able to maintain the foundations of this, or return to it – well rehearsed in the dynamic of love – if we found we’d lost it for a while because of the shift.

People talk about love as if a spell is cast, but when Jordy and I met there wasn’t this huge lightning bolt moment for me and I always wonder if that did us a favour. The way we met was unusual; at a hostel in Budapest. What was clear was that there was no power dynamic that made me a blushing, shy girl who wanted to be what he liked (as there had been in other relationships), nor was there this thrill of the chase as we stayed in close proximity to each other for weeks. There also wasn’t the opportunity to “see what happens” because we were both leaving for different countries so a decision had to be made. How I remember it is was that there was this really adorable, hot guy who was incredibly kind and fun and who felt like someone I could be best friends with except I wanted to… jump him. I liked him specifically because he didn’t have an ego, he didn’t sleep around at the hostels like others’ did, and because he didn’t pursue me with the voracity of a bird of prey. Instead, he quietly told everyone he loved me, quietly cancelled his flights home to Australia to meet me, and we just hung out and had a lot of fun. At the end of the two weeks, when he said he wanted to “make something of this” I replied refusing to sleep with him and he clarified that’s not what he meant, but that he wanted to try and be in a relationship even though we were from different countries. I replied “sure, let’s try” and then shared with my friend that I thought it would never work. I was trying to play entirely aloof, but all along I had a quiet but persistent voice that said “this is exactly the type of person you want to be with, don’t let this guy slip away”. I always wonder if the threats that plague our relationship, such as being from opposite sides of the world, and the huge periods of long-distance we did made us better at communicating and made us better at practicing love. When proximity doesn’t have the ability to keep you together, you have to step up.

If love is a verb. These are things that Jordy does that make me feel loved:

✷ he accepts that I am not a morning person and wakes me up with coffee every morning
✷ sometimes he will put on whatever song I am currently obsessed with to wake me up if I am struggling to get out of bed
✷ he fixes, amends or solves practical problems for me without me asking: velcro’s a brush into my eyebrow palette, sticks the switch of my lamp to my bedside table so I can always find it, labels the hook my towel should go on, makes a message for bathroom mirror so I remember to take my pill.
✷ he reminds me to drink water and take tablets when I forget
✷ he encourages me to nap, lets me nap whenever I need to (even when it’s inconvenient for him) and wakes me up gently (this one is huge for me because I have an inbuilt belief that I am lazy and I hate how much sleep I need)
✷ he is curious and genuinely interested in my work, my political views, my knowledge and my experience
✷ he subscribes to the paid tier of this newsletter, and read my posts
✷ he asks me if I “feel better” every single time I get out of the shower
✷ he brings me a cups of tea whenever I’m quiet or sad
✷ he encourages me to do art or drum whenever I feel unmoored and encourages my passions
✷ when I say I am almost done with work he figures out how long that means and accepts that I will be a lot longer than I actually mean
✷ he tells me plans are happening earlier so that I am tricked into being on time and not stressed
✷ he shows up for all hard conversations and he has got consistently better at accountability
✷ he’ll talk though anything we need to talk through for as long as it takes
✷ when I fuck up plans, break something, forget things and make mistakes that impact us he challenges the way I speak to myself about it (“i am the worst person” is usually where I go)
✷ he puts socks on me when he thinks I am cold
✷ he makes me handmade cards for my birthday or special events
✷ loves me when I am most loud, silly, wild
✷ he hugs and listens to me after therapy
✷ he has never, and will never make me feel bad about myself, annoying, too much, broken or stupid. He has never put me down, insulted me, or made me feel not enough.

These are not an exhaustive list, and there are also things he doesn’t do as well that he is working on too. As there are for me. But the list makes clear to me part of the recipe for why our relationship is still so good after all these years. Jordy doesn’t get lazy in his love – and neither do I – he doesn’t expect our relationship to just continue as is without effort, and while it’s true that when life is hammering us and our routine leaves little time for each other we start to fall short on the effort front, we will both always show up to notice it, talk about it and make a bit of a plan.

It takes two people to make love a verb, and that’s the tricky part; each person has to want to practice (that’s compatibility, baby), and equally life will throw things that deprioritise or numb your ability to make that effort too; in the wake of my PTSD diagnosis it feel like my brain had been wired differently and things that used to come naturally now don’t (compassion for myself and others, the ability to be present at any given moment). But the want is still there, and that’s what makes it so painful: I want to be able to show up in love, but some days it feels harder, instead I try to with whatever capacity I have, and the only rule is that I must communicate when I struggling so that he knows why. Telling someone how you’re feeling so that you can ensure they are feeling secure and considered? Thats love, too.

This whole post has spoken in the context of love in romantic relationships, but what hooks was also communicating in All About Love was how love is a revolutionary political act, too because by seeing it as a verb and understanding the power of it in the collective we can start to live new social realities into existence with our actions. How do I become more loving as a person by practicing with all those around me? How do I lean into compassion rather than judgment in my every day life? How do I learn to act in loving ways towards strangers? This is a beautiful way to start to understand the power of love as a verb, too.

Thoughts? Hit the comments.

Verb you!

G x