Life has calmed significantly. My new nephew will be here within weeks (there’s been some crazy health problems, but baby and mom are both doing well), I’m continuing to learn new things and be challenged at work (the challenge sometimes threatens to overwhelm me), the family is generally healthy (only one serious concern in recent history), and the love life is taking interesting twists and turns (I’m happy, and remaining cautiously optimistic and quiet about it). Overall, though, things are moving along nicely.

This post, though, has been brewing in my head for a bit, and today I’ve made the time to write it down.  It’s about a simple thing, to me: love.

If you’ve seen me around any of my family or close friends, you know that love and affection are things I give freely and often. I love without expectation of reciprocation or anything in return. I cannot think of a time that loving didn’t come as easily to me as breathing.

To clarify: to me, sex and love are not directly interchangeable. I have had sex with people I didn’t love, and I have loved people I didn’t have sex with. Too, love does not have different types for me. I love. I don’t love my mom more or differently than my brother, or my Ani more or differently than my current love interest. They all run together and come from the same place for me. I, obviously, will express my love for all of those people in different ways, but it all feels the same to me.

All of that said, I have moved to a position (At work, Socially, Mentally) recently that (it seems) faking affection is common, and generally accepted as the norm. I have exposed myself to (by trusting and loving) many people in the last year who have turned out to be completely different from the person I thought they were, or at least from the person they presented to me. I am struggling now with where to go from here. I am frustrated. All of the rules and boundaries I set up for myself after I got divorced were working so well until now. I can’t figure out what I blinded myself to in these situations, or what I could have done differently, or what the hell happened. You know, beyond the people in question using my openness to their advantage, and manipulating me into a position of trust.

If I accept that I was willfully deceived, and cannot find the misstep I took, or the flag I missed, I have an immediate urge to protect myself from that happening again. In other words: Stop trusting people. That… won’t happen. I crossed that bridge years ago, and accepted pain and discouragement as part of the price of living, but it’s still my first gut reaction. My unwillingness to cut myself off means, unfortunately, that I have to accept that this will continue to happen.

For this exact reason, I have become more cautious. Slower to love, slower to trust, slower to allow into the inner chamber of my heart. Mostly because I am so easily manipulated by the person receiving my love, once it’s expressed. I will blind myself to almost any problems with that person until I cannot ignore it any more.  The caution is a compromise I make with myself: you can still love, but maybe you should actually *know* someone, at least a little, before you express it to them.

The oddest thing, to me, is what happened when I accepted that loving people like I do meant I would get hurt: I stopped being mad at myself for allowing myself to be manipulated. I stopped being mad at people for hurting me. I stopped holding grudges and hating. I decided I didn’t have time for any of that, and everything came down to a single decision: Are you good for me or bad for me? If you’re bad for me, I stop hanging out with you. No drama, no hard feelings, no bullshit. I just stop hanging out with you. (There is certainly a middle ground here where I can have an affection for you, not love you, and still hang out with you, but for the purpose of this post I’m speaking in extremes.) That doesn’t mean that every friend I’ve lost over the last five years was due to them being bad for me, but slowly backing away has led to much less drAma for me.

If you’re good for me? I hold your heart closer to mine than you can possibly imagine, and make sure you bloody well know that I love you, unconditionally and completely. I don’t know of any other way to be. If you hurt me repeatedly or intentionally, you’ll probably lose me, but it won’t be until after you’ve gotten many chances. I forgive a lot too. But that’s for an entirely different post.