why does love get so complicated and how can we simplify it?

Before I dig into this I feel like I have to start with emotional unavailability. I feel like we have all been there. And it is completely understandable; failed relationships, past pain, not wanting to put your heart back out on the line again, put in the time, put in the energy, invest your life into someone without the reassurance that it’ll be worth it or not. That will last or not.

As someone just coming out of a long-term relationship, I can completely understand why a lot of us are emotionally unavailable - whether we are consciously aware of that fact or not. But that is a huge reason why relationships and love can get complicated. Were we really ready to get into something in the first place?

Yet we still want love. And by love I mean attention, energy, affection, romance, fun, dates, adventure, someone outside of ourselves to spend time with. How come we remain emotionally unavailable yet we still want these things? It’s got me thinking lately of how the social constructs of a conventional relationship are such love + romance killers.

What complicates love are unhealthy patterns, unhealthy expectations, social conditioning of how relationships should be, people who are not self-aware, people who are not actively doing healthy inner work on themselves, people projecting their internal state onto others, people thinking that the come down from the honeymoon phase is abnormal or not supposed to happen when in fact the honeymoon phase is just one stage of a relationship.

If we have not taken a healing path, faced ourselves, realized what unhealthy habits we have, we will never have a successful love.

At this point in my life I think that someone who works on themselves and is willing to grow - on their own and with a partner - is the biggest green flag that exists.

What complicates love is the mind, what complicates love is unconscious programming, what complicates love is the ego, what complicates love is unhealed parent/child wounds from when we were young.

What complicates love is an attitude of “You must act the way I want you to act otherwise I don’t have as strong feelings for you”.

Relationships are not supposed to have any sort of ownership aspect to them. Relationships are not supposed to be ways to feel happy, fulfilled, excited if being alone means we don’t feel those ways. We must be able to make ourselves happy first and then from that space we could attract a great partnership.

So how can we simplify love?

We can do the work. One of my all time favorite book ever is How to Do the Work by Dr. Nicole LaPera. She teaches emotional processing, emotional maturity, self-soothing, how to start a healing journey, nervous system regeneration + regulation, emotional resilience, and multiple golden nuggets of wisdom about childhood wounds from parents.

How we can simplify love is we can become self-aware and we can start to heal. We can become more present, we can slightly detach from a lover so that everything they do doesn’t affect us so much, we can always be willing to take in feedback and grow, we can reconnect with ourselves, we can reconnect with nature, we can practice organic grattitude, we can work to become better people. And it gets easier and easier over time.

Remember, people will only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.

I hope you’ve loved this article.