I'm Sorry, But You're Hard to Love
It might be pride month, but instead of celebrating, I'm here to beat down some pride. I know the love scene is one where a bit of confidence and stubbornness will do you some good. But arrogance is a pungent smell in the water.
There's a certain notion that has accompanied the "I deserve love" discourse and that's the notion that you or anyone is easy to love. Now regardless of whence this hilarious idea made its descent, it should not have been well received. I'm not saying that people don't deserve love. Though the validity of the thought and its application to every individual can be argued, I am not the one to make it. Maybe later.
While we might believe that everyone "deserves'' love, it's incredibly arrogant to assume we are easy to love. Arrogant and self-deluding it is.
No one is and has ever been easy to love. This is due to each person, regardless of how "best fit" they might be, they are imperfect by very design. There is something to contend with, and that contention bears itself a witness to your love.
To assume someone is easy to love or assert that you are easy to love is to demean self. For one who's easy to love is one whose existence poses no challenge, no need for exercise and effort, no need for growth. They are "perfect"; having reached the peak of their very existence.
They are perfect; perfectly created, designed and evolved to fit like a glove into someone else's life and being. To ask nothing, demand nothing and receive nothing in return for their love. They are easy to love because they don't need to be given to. They don't receive nor do they ask. There is no demand hence no need for supply. All efforts are equal even if it's no effort but the occasional patronization and platitudes of "I love you".
Those who claim to be easy to love are either, in my opinion, desperate masochistic singles or egregiously narcissistically unbearable people who think they have absolutely no aspect to them that needs to be contended with. Whether they're full of themselves or think little of themselves. Whether they be the peak of "desirability" or the very bottom of the confidence barrel, one thing is true for both. They, by being "easy to love", make themselves difficult to love.
The narcissist rejects every relationship that has any challenge as "not meant to be" or "not good enough to love me". Because they believe that they are the most desirable, the light bringer of love. They think to love them is to "match" them. They are already complete in their love and ability to love, that to be with them is to constantly be reminded of how "short" you are and how they "bear" you until they can't.
The desperately masochistic believe they have just about everything to make up for. Hence, they deem themselves more committed, attentive and attuned to loving you. They conduct their love in such a way that they give everything and reject anything. They are hard to take out, difficult to gift, and remorseful to help. They are but a bundle of insecurities plagued with the curse of "working hard to deserve your love". Because by existing, you've "earned" their love and they only need but hopefully come to "deserve" yours.
They might seem easy to love. After all, life makes so much demand of us hence our domain of romance should be one with no demands, expectations and pressure. Just "light and vibes". Not to be a bearer of bad news, but no one is without demands, even they.
They demand that you allow them to carry all the burden. They demand that you support their delusion of needing to earn a "License to love". They render you unable to love them or at best barely be able to. There's no way to make them happy. You are not allowed to labour or contribute to their happiness and fulfilment. To force your help is to violate them and hence lose their love. They create a feeling of impotence in their partners, forcing them to cope by leaving or becoming a narcissist.
To be easy to love is to deny your love a reason for strength. No one judges the truthfulness of a poor man's loyalty when there's money. It's when your coffers ring out in emptiness that you shall see whose footprint remembers your compound. Likewise, the true test of love is when being loving itself becomes something to contend with.
During periods of change where the growth of both parties is in conflict and a resolution seems difficult to achieve. When the act of loving requires you to bend the knee in submission and your head bowed in apology. When things don't seem to fit anymore. Looking through the structure of your love to find where it needs repair and what needs renovation.
We are all, each one of us, hard to love and have always been. No parent in all truthfulness will claim they experienced no difficulty raising a child or more. The test of a parent's love is not measured in the number of cute smiles their babies give them, but in how deep their appreciation of those smiles grows, despite the ever-growing difficulties of raising a human.
When friends become "close friends" - which I argue is when one truly becomes a friend - is during times of trials and tribulations. From not snitching on you even though it would have saved them from punishment to carving you out of the ice of stagnancy and emotional bankruptcy. Friends who fulfil the closest thing to "for better or for worse". None of them would confess total ease in being a friend that has done all that.
To declare one's self as "easy to love" is to never admit inadequacies. It is to cower in defeat at the troubling aspects of one's personality. To see with glasses tinted with darkness, a twisted unreal image of yourself. An image you know is false, yet uphold it to be the truth. You could never be the problem.
To say "I am easy to love", is to ask to be easily abandoned. For if reality is anymore the insufferable bastard that it is, you will be unable to deliver on the promise of "ease". Of embodying no difficulty, having no demands and needing nothing of the other. And when you fail, which you will, you will be abandoned. For that is the only real outcome of a relationship built on the delusion that "to love is easy, and so is to be loved".
To be difficult to love is not to be impossible to love. If it meant so, then no one would have hoped to be loved. To be recognized as the bearer of a love that challenges is to seek someone who has the strength of character and being, to love. It's to choose with the expectations that you both will live and struggle as one. For it is only in a life that assures ease that anyone can be easy to love. If life held no obstacles to frustrate us, we will love and be loved with ease.
But life is as they say "not a bed of roses". Life is difficult on numerous levels. To join yourself in love with another is to bear the difficulty of being alive together. To comfort, support, guide and protect each other.
To love demands intentionality. It cannot and will not allow itself to be half-assed. It will not tolerate mediocrity nor will it accommodate the delusional for long. Loving anyone will demand of you strength, willpower and a will to forgive, constantly.
No one is easy to love. Not even God. There's always something that's hard to accept. There's always something that you'll suffer in return for loving someone. I don't want someone who'd expect me to be easy to love. I want someone who recognizes that sometimes, I take a little bit of effort and work. That sometimes I can't put in the work and need a break, and I also deserve care. To be held, caressed as much as I am chastised.
An easy love is one without substance. A person who's easy to love exists in the place where dreams go to sleep. Being easy to love is nothing but Disney fairytales and teenage fantasies.
And if your partner finds it easy to love you, you found someone with the strength to love you. Someone with the willpower to contend with your existence. Nothing about you became "easy".