Love Needs Roots
Choosing growth over falling: why lasting love requires roots, not just romance.
I Don't Want to Fall in Love. I Want to Grow in Love.
The phrase falling in love has always bothered me.
Perhaps it is the imagery.
When we fall, we trip. We lose our balance. We suddenly find ourselves moving in a direction we hadn't necessarily intended to go. Eventually, we land.
And somehow, we have made that the metaphor for one of the most profound relationships human beings can experience.
I don't want to fall in love.
I want to grow in love.
Growing suggests something entirely different.
Growing requires roots. It requires nourishment, patience, attention, and room to change. It acknowledges that there will be seasons when everything blossoms and seasons when very little appears to be happening at all.
That sounds much more like love to me.
We Don't Remain the Same People We First Met
One of the great misconceptions about lasting relationships may be the expectation that the person we initially love will remain essentially the same. They won't. Neither will we.
The woman I was at 20 is not the woman I became at 40, and she is certainly not the woman I am today.
Life changes us. Education changes us. Parenthood can change us. Careers change us. Grief changes us. Success changes us. Illness changes us. Aging changes us. Sometimes, simply surviving something we never imagined we would have to survive changes us.
So how could love possibly remain unchanged?
Perhaps it isn't supposed to.
Maybe the goal isn't to remain forever in the intoxicating emotional state we call falling in love.
Maybe the greater adventure is learning how to love the person standing beside us as they continue becoming someone new.
Love Needs Room
Growing in love also means understanding that love shouldn't require either person to become smaller.
There was a time when I thought loving someone meant giving more, accommodating more, carrying more, and finding another little corner of myself I could surrender when the relationship required it.
Age has taught me something different.
Healthy love needs room.
- Room for two people to have dreams.
- Room for disagreement.
- Room for solitude.
- Room for changing beliefs.
- Room for careers, friendships, creativity, spirituality, and discovery.
- Room to say, “This is who I am becoming,” without fearing that growth will cost us the relationship.
The strongest love isn't threatened by growth. It makes room for it.
Roots Are Different From Chains
There is also an important difference between being rooted together and being bound together.
Roots nourish. Chains restrain.
Love should never become the reason someone stops becoming themselves.
When two people grow in love, their roots may intertwine while each remains a whole person. They support one another without possessing one another.
Sometimes those roots grow together for a lifetime.
Sometimes people grow in different directions.
And perhaps maturity means understanding that a relationship ending does not necessarily mean the love within it was meaningless.
Something can have been real and still have reached the end of its season.
Growing in Love With Ourselves
There is another relationship we rarely include when talking about love: the relationship we have with ourselves.
For many women, particularly those of us who were taught to nurture everyone around us, loving ourselves can become the relationship we postpone indefinitely.
- We care for children.
- Partners.
- Parents.
- Students.
- Clients.
- Communities.
- Businesses.
Everyone gets placed somewhere on the list.
And somehow, we keep placing ourselves at the bottom.
Growing in love with ourselves means becoming curious about the woman we've become.
- What does she want now?
- What brings her joy?
- What has she outgrown?
- What does she no longer need to apologize for?
- What dreams did she put away because somebody once convinced her they were unrealistic?
Perhaps one of the privileges of growing older is realizing that we are still becoming.
I Want Love With Roots
I no longer find the idea of falling particularly romantic.
I want something much more extraordinary.
- I want love that grows.
- Love that changes because the people experiencing it change.
- Love that survives difficult conversations.
- Love that doesn't demand sameness.
- Love that celebrates another person's becoming rather than fearing it.
- Love that knows when to hold tightly and when to loosen its grip.
- Love that provides nourishment without becoming a cage.
- And, most of all, love that recognizes that neither person ever reaches a final version of themselves.
We are living things.
We are supposed to grow.
Perhaps the question we should ask isn't, “Are we still in love?”
Perhaps it is, “Are we still growing in love?”
Because falling may be how some love stories begin.
But I believe growing is how the beautiful ones endure.
