Real Love is Endurance
Have you found yourself resenting a partner’s need for closeness? Do you stay in relationships long after you feel fulfilled, hoping eventually enough effort will pay off? Or do you get complacent and settle because alternatives feel so daunting?
We’re taught, through simplified images and stories, that love and relationships are meant to sustain our lives, yet in real life, love never seems to go according to plan. Love and relationships seem natural, effortless, and flow. But real love isn’t always easy or flows - most of the time it takes serious effort. Working through challenges, clarifying differences, and respecting another’s life orientation. Love, for ourselves and another person, with all its richness, demands something much harder from us. Love is endurance.
Endurance is not self-abandonment. It’s the art of staying present—committed to the relationship without betraying your own needs or values. If you’ve ever stayed too long, hoping things would change, or left too soon to protect yourself, you know how thin the line can feel.
Evolving Love is to learn how to tolerate another. In true partnership love, it asks you to dig deeper and see where you’re not yet able to accept another person. Where you might not have accepted yourself. Love is a mirror. Ego asks for creating and matching an image. Love pulls from the soul.
Love asks you to learn how to give others grace. Forgive them for their flaws, faults, and underdeveloped parts. Recognizing another’s limits and accepting them is an act of love, in all its grace. Anger and hurt show us where boundaries weren’t honored, by yourself because you never established them, or because another transgressed them.
Love teaches.
Notice how love helps you recognize the parts of yourself that are still unhealed. When you feel triggered, what is that pain trying to teach you? Sometimes, love challenges you to see where you’re giving away your power or projecting your own needs onto your partner. Love’s anguish can be a clue: are you shrinking yourself, or are you pushing others away to protect old wounds?
Love, and all its messiness, shines the path towards recovering our Selves, our sovereignty, our freedom. The messiness of love includes tolerating the tension of not knowing the difference between endurance and self-abandonment. Pain shows us where we’re chained to expectations, disappointments, and a desire for control. Love, and its opposites, lead us to our wholeness. It’s only a matter of perspective.
If you notice yourself staying in a relationship long after it feels nourishing, ask yourself: What am I hoping will eventually change? If you tend to leave when meeting challenges, can you name the fear that’s driving you? Seeing your patterns more clearly offers a path to healthier, more honest love.
Love will throw you around and ask you to stand up. Your Self-Love will demand that you find yourself before you settle for someone less than what you want and your soul knows you need. When commitment feels like a loss of freedom, love asks you to stay one minute longer when your impulse is to run. When you tell yourself you just haven’t found the ‘right’ person yet, Love begs inquisitively- what does your ‘right’ mean?
Perhaps you’re replaying the fight, or the conversation, wondering how you’re still somehow not enough. Maybe you start fantasizing about an easier love. In frenetic anxiety, growth asks us to learn how to sit still, —anchor in breath, reconnect with the body, away from the spiral in the mind.
Just as you want to close down, Soul asks that you open. Sometimes growth in a relationship is staying. Sometimes growth is leaving. The value comes in learning the difference and where your edge of expansion lies.
Love asks us to let go when it hurts more than hanging on, waiting for someone to reach the potential your mind made up for them. Love asks us to accept people where they are, not where we want them to be. Not where you hope they’ll be and not who you’ve imagined them into becoming.
Often, Love asks us to be and live in the now, even if it’s painful, not to disassociate to the past or the future. Neither of those planes is real; they only exist in the fantastical mind. Fantasy is magical, but enduring love from the soul is only here and now, always.
Indefinitely, Love asks us to stand up for human decency and personal freedom. Love knows that we each have our own paths to walk in this life, and it also helps to be kind to those walking parallel to us.
For you, where, right now, does love invite you to stretch—and where does it ask you to let go? Notice how your body and heart respond to that question. You don’t need to know the answer— the act of asking, considering, contemplating, is the gift you give yourself.
