Hey baby, love doesn't always come with a life you can live in, and that's something we are never really prepared for.
I know i was shocked when i came to earth and realized, oh my gosh, there's more needed.
And it sucks, i know baby, but we need to talk about it because love is simply not enough.
Listen it's.
If you're not a million years old.
You were probably raised on a diet of cinematic and cultural crescendos.
You know, Pretty Woman, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, When Harry Met Sally, which other one?
Bridget Jones Diary Titanic, the notebook, Romeo and Juliet or familial declarations, where love is the thing that conquers all, the thing that always finds a way, the thing you reach when everything else collapses.
We are fed love as salvation, destiny.
We learn that if you love hard enough, if you love purely enough, things will eventually work out.
But ask anybody
Ask anybody who grew up in a home where love was professed but never felt.
Ask anybody who stayed in a relationship where they heard, I love you every day.
Oh my God, I love you.
But then guess what?
No tenderness, no safety, no presence, nothing in the room with them.
It wasn't even on the street with them.
Ask anybody who loved somebody deeply and still felt unbearably alone.
They'll tell you a very different story.
In fact, I think, Pearl thinks that's the issue.
Really, we as a collective, we have never really agreed on what love is.
We speak about it constantly, always.
I mean, look at me right now.
We are obsessive about love and then we are reverent.
And yet in practice, we are all operating with wildly different definitions.
For some people...
Love is a feeling.
It's this intense, all-consuming, chemical thing.
For other people, love is a choice.
Something you wake up and recommit to, even when it's inconvenient.
Some people say love is sacrifice, you know?
The giddy-bam soldiers of the day.
People who think that love is about how much of themselves they can give, how much pain they can endure, how much they can erase themselves, just to prove that they are lovable, just to prove that they love.
Some people think it's compromise, it's commitment, it's loyalty at all costs.
Some people think it's sacrifice.
Some people call love freedom.
I agree.
And for the devils, you know them, the breakfast servers.
It's suffering vengeance manipulation, chaos.
And you're probably battling the urge to interrupt me and say yeah Pearl, but that's not real love.
My point exactly is Everybody and their uncle Anthony is running on their own definition, their own belief system, their own story shaped by culture trauma, family dynamics religion,
What else?
Movies, movies, yelp, survival.
So if we cannot even agree on what love means, doesn't that tell us something super important?
Love itself is not a relationship skill.
Oh my gosh.
When you strip down intimacy down to its mechanics, regardless of what your personal definition of love is, when you strip it down.
I'm going to use a car analogy.
Stay with me.
I have a driver's license.
I haven't driven in a while, but this is what I think.
Okay.
Love is like the fuel.
You can have the most expensive, the purest fuel in the world.
If the engine is missing gears, if the pistons are cracked, the car is not going anywhere.
You'll sit there, full tank, staring at the windshield and that bee will be staring back at you.
It'll be giving stranded, very much stranded.
Psychologically, this is the gap between affection and compatibility.
Affection is the warm fuzzies, the chemistry, the attraction, the pull, the way you miss somebody.
It's the way your body feels, the way your body leans towards them, the way your body craves them.
Now, compatibility is the system itself.
It's emotional availability, how conflict is handled, whether repair ever actually happens, emotional regulation, somebody.
This is where we all fail, isn't it?
How money is managed, how chores are divided, how stress is processed, whether somebody can apologize without defensiveness.
It's where you see yourself in five years.
Whether you want children or not.
And how rigid or flexible is that dream?
Whether one of you dreams of living by the sea like I do.
And then your partner wants to live in a big city because they feel suffocated outside a big city.
It's values.
It's worldview.
It's nervous systems.
Infrastructure.
Love is emotional truth, while compatibility is the operational logistical relational, boring truth.
I honestly think this is where we all get stuck.
Because you know...
Liking somebody is great.
Affection feels all consuming.
It feels like meaning.
We run on that until compatibility becomes inevitable.
For real, for real.
And I'm telling you, and you crash.
You crash real bad.
Why?
Because there's nothing that knocks off that love high faster than reality.
So yes, you can feel real love for somebody and still not be able to live with what comes with them.
It doesn't mean you don't love them.
You can love somebody who cannot meet you emotionally.
You can love somebody who does not know how to repair after conflict.
You can love somebody whose nervous system clashes with yours in ways that leave you constantly anxious, constantly feeling small and exhausted.
You can love somebody who wants a future that looks nothing like yours.
You can love somebody whose worldview makes you want to throw up in your mouth at least four times a day.
But that's just it.
That love is just that.
The reality we must all face is that you cannot love your way out of misalignment.
You cannot love your way out of a partner or a parent who refuses therapy, who refuses growth, who refuses to change.
You cannot love your way out of abuse.
And this is a big one.
You cannot love your way into shared values.
You cannot love your way into shared direction or shared accountability.
You cannot love your way through a fundamental mismatch, through fundamental differences in how two or more people move through the world.
Relationships are sustained by the unglamorous, by the boring, deeply unromantic things.
We were never taught to value as much as passion.
Yes, love brings people together, but what keeps them together is everything else.
So if you find yourself in one of them painful, frustrating relationships, whether you're still in it or not okay.
I think we can all agree that love is not a valid excuse to tolerate the intolerable.
Accepting this is not cynical.
I think it's liberating.
It's actually empowering because it means that we can do everything right.
We can be kind.
We can be loyal.
We can be patient.
We can be passionate.
We can be honest.
We can be all these things and still lose.
Yeah, we can be all these things and still lose.
Because sometimes, you know, we have it in our heads that, oh my God, I'm so good, why me?
You can do all that and still lose.
If we can accept this as a fundamental truth, then we don't have to question our capacity for love.
We don't have to question whether we are unlovable or lovable or worthy or unworthy.
We don't question ourselves when things fall apart.
We look at the system, the infrastructure, which might be faulty.
We don't even have to be bitter.
We can honestly look at this person and go you know I love you, but this I love you and this still isn't right.
We become people who can choose truth over fantasy.
People who can choose a life that we can actually live in.
This is the difference between people who can leave something this quick.
And you're like, oh my God, but I still love them.
And they're like, and so?
And that's because they understand this thing fundamentally.
That love is simply not enough.
You understand that loving deeply does not obligate you to stay where love cannot grow.
Out of you.
Yes.
