Nobody HAS to love you

I came to a startling realization this week:

Nobody HAS to love you.

Don’t worry, I can hear the rebuttals already.

After all, I had them all myself!

“What about your family? Friends? People you’ve helped, loved, or sacrificed so much of your life for?”

Sorry. None of them have to love you.

Usually, the people I stated do love you, and that’s great! But what makes it great is that they don’t have to!

Every single day, the people who love you choose to keep doing so

Romantic love is the best example because when compared to family, this love happens much more intensely (for better or worse), so we can observe how falling in and out of love looks like much more closely.

All relationships, whether platonic or romantic, are filled with obstacles and hardship. If your relationship doesn’t withstand these difficult moments, then it was never love to begin with.

C.S. Lewis touches on this when explaining romantic love, or “Eros” as he called it:

Some of my most fond memories with loved ones involve struggling together.

It’s funny the things you can laugh back at with friends after you’ve gone through what you once thought was hell.

And yet while I’m glad I came to the realization that love is always a privilege and not a right, it began with a stray thought that conveyed the exact opposite message:

“There’s something special about being loved by someone who doesn’t have to love you at all.”

But even with C.S. Lewis’s statement in mind, it’s important to realize that there are some things from which a relationship can never repair.

An affair, for example, is hardly something worth working through.

Which only reinforces my original point:

NO ONE HAS TO LOVE YOU.

So look at the love you take for granted and be thankful for it.

It’s still here, and it may not always be.

So it seems that the thought that started all of this was more right than I knew, because all love is this way:

There’s something special about being loved by someone who doesn’t have to love you at all.