the love lock series: the delicate daisy chapter
Originally published April 25, 2023
Love is recognizing the need for growth, both in yourself and another person. It’s also discovering the beauty of progression, like watching a flower slowly begin to bloom.
While interviewing my sweet friend Amanda Dominguez, I learned how much love requires change. She has been with her boyfriend since they were 14 years old. She said that becoming boyfriend and girlfriend felt like a natural next step at that age, because it felt like something more than friendship, each really liking each other and wanting to spend all their time together. Amanda expressed how the idea of someone else getting to have what they have would’ve made her jealous. “It seems like a very childish way of looking at love, but I feel like that was also a way that I viewed it, like ‘I really like this person and I want them to be my best friend, I don’t want them to be anybody else’s.’” Her idea of love at 14 was “‘you are my best friend and I love spending time with you.’” At 19 she has grown to reflect more of a “virtuous” love. “Love is sacrifice, love is compromise, love is fairness… I think a part of love is accepting that things change too, and love is flexibility. Love cannot be stubborn, because if you’re stubborn, and I was to say ‘I still love the person he was at 14,’ I’m delusional, because that’s not who he is anymore and not who I am at all either, so I think love really evolves over time… love is painful… because when you’re in a relationship it’s not your life anymore, it’s your life plus consideration of another person.” She added, “In this country, we’re so individual, we want to pursue our freedoms, but love is also choosing to relinquish some of your freedom by giving it to another person, because you’re giving somebody a piece of your life and you have to include them in it, because it’s not fair if you want to have a place in their heart and you don’t want to make that space for them.”
Just like how flowers need water, sunlight, and good soil to grow, love requires the work that two people choose to put into it.
An anonymous friend of mine shared her insight with me: “Falling in love for me was a flush of emotions and chemistry and compatibility and shared humor and a lot of the things you see in romance movies. BUT I think choosing to pursue a relationship with someone involves a lot more of the heady work no one wants to talk about. Evaluating who they are/what they value, recognizing the person they bring out in you, and analyzing how those two people make each other better/worse. I don’t know if anyone is ever ‘ready’ for a relationship, so that language frustrates me sometimes. I think choosing someone to go through a relationship with is as simple as seeing value in them as a person and seeing value in getting to know them romantically and the journey you envision the two of you going on together. All of that to say I think falling in love can be really easy, but making that love work in the context of a relationship is so much harder.”
Love is delicate like a daisy, requiring the work to produce growth. It’s not always easy, but the results are worth it.
