What my Father Taught me About Love

Photo by Stéphane Mingot on Unsplash

Every Valentines Day, I think about my dad.

I know. It’s strange. But bear with me.

When I was a teenager, I experienced my first love. I was living the dreamy bliss of being head over heels as a young person. We had no obstacles. No responsibilities with plenty of first-times. Nothing tangible in our way. My first crush, my first kiss, my first feeling of sharing the butterflies. I felt incredibly understood, attractive, and interesting. Blah blah blah.

I decided to ruin it by talking about it with my dad.

My dad and I had a ritual of visiting with one another over coffee in his at-home office. This particular morning I had woken up extra early to ride bicycles in the sunrise with my first boyfriend. When I came back home, sweaty, disheveled and doe-eyed, much to his concern, he asked me where I’d been. So I told him.

He put down his coffee and leaned back into his chair. I remember him looking at me with concern, which always concerned me. Finally he asked, ‘So….what are you doing with this boy?’

Suddenly I felt embarrassed. As clumsy as a teenager could I said: “I don’t know. I just really like him.”

He then said, “Well, I really like bread pudding. I think you like him different than how I really like bread pudding”.

I remember suddenly feeling defensive. I was being asked to explain something I didn’t know how to explain. As a pragmatic person, then and now, I took a pause. I thought about it.

I responded to him with thirteen-year-old words that frustrated him:

“Like, I don’t know, like I want to date him or something?”

“What do you mean you want to date him? What does dating even mean for someone your age?”

Suddenly I felt very embarrassed. The more I tried to look for a pragmatic answer that would satisfy him and accurately describe the way that I felt, the more abstract it became and therefore more trivial. I had always felt very close to my dad, and suddenly I felt as though he either didn’t understand what I meant, or he found my feelings to be trivial. He was supposed to just get it.

Part of me wanted to escape the conversation, as it was kind of a buzz kill. I wanted him on board, to just get it, understanding and enthusiastic about my feelings.

All I knew was that I wanted to be around this person always. I wanted to share the things I did with this person, and be part of what they did. I wanted to make decisions around this person, and I wanted time, every day, to just soak this person up.

And all of this… I told my dad. He laughed and told me, “That doesn’t sound very practical.” My dad and I communicated through more than words. I could feel his energy belittling what I’d said, making me feel foolish and aloof.

Making me feel foolish and aloof. Making love feel trivial and false. Making me feel undeserving and detached.

I carried these sentiments into my love life. My dads view of love, perhaps evolving, was one that included the experience of divorce….twice.

I won’t drag you through the heartache and breakups of my late teens and early twenties. I will say that hyper-pragmatically addressing relationship problems was definitely a buzz kill. Whenever my relationships grew weary or difficult, I would recall that feeling of embarrassment. This only grew when I learned of my neurodivergence.

I couldn’t ‘fight’ for something that at the end of the day required arguing on behalf of its validity and worth, when after some deep recollection and thinking I decided was silly and unimportant…or, to grant it some emotional charm, juvenile.

When I’d confide in friends about feelings around my relationships, I’d prematurely cut myself off, again recalling this conversation, equating discussing heartache and love pains with gossiping or small talk. You may be thinking…poor Vanessa, you were conditioned to have your truth and feelings invalidated! Don’t worry (or worry, maybe-) my feelings never even developed as far to invalidated, I quickly talked myself out of them, through hyper-literalism, pragmatism.

Then I experienced something I hadn’t before. I found myself in a toxic and codependent relationship. Up until then, my brain functioned too literally to wind up h ere. In this case, and for the first time, other feelings, like pride, possession, validation and ego arose. I couldn’t ignore my feelings anymore. This time they were detrimental to my functionality and sanity. I became obsessive and straddled experiences similar to addiction — the intense high of infatuation and fulfillment as well as the terrible low of abandonment and hopelessness.

Aha! A chance to use my greatest weapon: pragmatism. Through some mindfulness, I sourced the urgency of these feelings to some kind of fear. So it came time for me to figure out what this fear was, and to address it, because I couldn’t carry on in the state I was in.

I communicated my love through intense presence and service. A+ for support, and tough love was off the table. I coddled, apologized and delivered. This didn’t feel like me; I’d frequently tell myself, Ness, this isn’t you… but who’s to say, and who’s to call a spade a spade, but a spade? My giving wasn’t recognized, it was rejected, and I felt especially hungry for care. That’s because I wasn’t giving — I was begging. I exhausted myself and emptied my cup, craving compassion and care from the only person unwilling to give it. And eventually, with a sliding scale of self-respect and exhaustion, I threw in the towel.

I reached a point where I had to focus specific and intentional time on constructively healing, that is, not letting thoughts of fear and sadness chip at my through the days and hours, and not letting my ‘healing’ consist of cyclical self-induced torture. This meant I had to decide what time of day I was going to ‘feel bad’, and really decide what I was going to do and accomplish during my ‘healing’ time. It seems, again, pragmatic, but I realized that I tended to be patient and compassionate with others while letting myself go; I needed to pivot my understanding of what is patient and understanding for me.

It was time to execute on a game plan. Imagine the sensation of spinning around in circles, you stop suddenly and feel dizzy. This is a great time to get knocked over.

Step 1: avoid things that bring me this sensation, that is, temporary triggers that I can face with confidence and even indifference once the dizziness stopped. Which brings us to step 2, and then to step 324023981.

I decided I’d give myself half an hour in the morning to process my thoughts. It didn’t have to be a harsh thirty minutes, occasionally a little more or a little less. This is where I’d focus my thoughts based on where I was. If I needed to cry, I’d cry. That was the allocated time, then back to business.

I’d then allocate another bit of time, usually just before dinner time, to do some intentional writing. I couldn’t just think, I needed a pipeline to release. I’d ask myself tacky questions that were incredibly self-focussed, like, where do I hope to see myself in five years? What kind of traits do I value in people around me and what kind of relationships will I cultivate? What will I NOT stand for in my relationships? What makes me happy? What do I like about myself? What did I do well in my previous relationship and what can I forgive myself for? Focussing on myself, my goals, my behavior, my own growth, values and accountability was the attention, care and presence that I ached for from a specific person.

But wait- what about pragmatism? What about bread pudding? Throughout this entire experience I felt a cricket on my shoulder reminding me that this was trivial. How? How could something so significantly attendant be caused by triviality, insignificance, unimportance? I decided I’d finally attempt to answer this question. This quest occupied my time and addressed my consciousness. Good distractions.

Without diving into a nihilistic view of the unimportance of everything, I found that taking a meditative stroll through the evolution of humanity brought some enlightenment.

I didn’t have to feel as though love were trivial. And even if it is, that it’s not my fault for still feeling it. And when it comes to heartbreak, from a partner, or a father, someone you trust and value, primitive awareness and, yes, pragmatism, can be your dearest healers.

That is, if you are like me. If you are still actively unlearning shame and embarrassment around love. If the idea of telling your potential mother-in-law, “My intentions with your son are to _______” feels like it should be finer tuned than a job resumé, and simultaneously tossed into a basket of triviality.

“Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, ‘cares’ — in quotes — about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation.”

Our thoughts and behaviors, however enslaving, are a hereditary and helped our ancestors get us here. This includes working with and connecting with others, earning their trust and approval, combating and disliking rivals and surviving with urgency. Robert Wright suggests three principles of this evolutionary design:

1. When we achieve our goals, we experience pleasure, and we like pleasure, so we are urgently active in our pursuits.
2. These pleasures are fleeting and leave us hungry so we can continue with even more urgency to achieve our goals, which often leads to pain and suffering only solved by getting our fix, or, at least, being on the pursuit.
3. We will focus our lives in sequential order of 1 and 2: pursue pleasure, obtain it, thirst for more.

It is no less than consequential that the pain and suffering we experience as a result of not achieving our goals are powerful and instinctive. It is not in the interest of evolution or natural selection for us to be ‘happy’, but instead ‘productive’. We were not designed to be happy. This design, though, uses exaggeration and illusion. Why does this matter? When experiencing an optical illusion, even after being told what you’re seeing isn’t what’s really there, you see it for what it isn’t.

These two lines are the same length, though our minds wish to see the line on the right as slightly longer.

Another way of putting it…knowing the truth about our circumstances doesn’t make us feel better. So, what does? Because God, I needed to feel better. What makes us feel better, in due time, practice and intention, is consciousness and mindfulness. Believe me, I am so sick of hearing these words, like the kale and coconut oil of self-help buzz words.

Mindfulness involves being aware of your emotions without identifying with them. Taking away the element of ‘I’ and allowing thoughts to think themselves, emotions to feel themselves and pass like floating clouds. Separating yourself from emotions becomes easier when you wrap your head around their fleetingness and experience them presently.

By paying attention to the stories our mind is telling us and the correlating emotions, for example, ‘I’ll never love someone the way I did them,’ or ‘The only time and place I feel fulfilled is when and where someone else fulfills me,’. I want to stress that part of the point I’m making is that when romantic love is toxic or unhealthy and the insistence is there, so brings the non-constructive pain, and while all feelings are valid and emotions are meant to be felt, the pragmatic triviality sitting on my shoulder screams especially loud when I’m going through a breakup.

There are benefits to romantic love that have kept up with our evolution. While co-creating with a partner brings the joys and milestones of family, the experience of pain and pleasure, intensely heightened through these practices, are the ultimate catalysts to enlightenment. There are even health benefits to being in a healthy romantic relationship, like better stress management, faster healing and longer life.

Romantic love also allows us the opportunity to open our hearts to receiving love, learn to love unconditionally and therefore give selflessly without expectation. Being mindful in love deepens our empathy and connections. Really, romantic love and mindfulness allows us to enjoy, flow with and manage our emotions when the stakes and triggers are high.

To love another person is to see the face of God. — Victor Hugo

I finally found the answer to my dads question, which really became mine. The way he really liked bread pudding isn’t the same as the way I really liked my first love. The delicate balance between appreciating our instincts and acknowledging that our minds evolution hasn’t caught up with our circumstances. Love should be practiced unconditionally, where peace and depth comes from keeping up with our evolution: being mindful without identifying with unconstructive pain. Love is a path to consciousness and should be appreciated as such.