Verbing love
I want you to make all my nouns come true.
If you feel unloved, you are likely nouning love.
Take the sentence, “He loves me.”
How do you know?
Love may be a verb there, but you prove it by making a list of nouns:
Compliments he speaks
Dishes he washes
Hugs he offers
Money he provides
Expressions he makes
Texts he writes
Gifts he gives
Questions he asks
I could go on and on because that’s what we do. We end up with a really high pile of nouns (those things can stack!).
Okay, so now we have a noun tower. What’s the problem?
It would be one thing if the blocks of this tower were constructed from solid observations of the one who loves us. But unfortunately we start carrying these nouns as children, collecting them from our parents and later from sources like friends, brief romances, books, movies, songs, commercials, and social media. And the origin of a huge portion of these nouns is unknown all together.
What we end up with is a worn, mismatched structure that would not pass a single building inspection (let alone our own inspection).
And we grip it like gold.
It’s the standard against which we judge whether we are loved, and, worse, whether we are lovable.
In fact, we become so attached to carrying around our arbitrary collection of nouns that we think they are part of us—that we need them to be whole. So we engineer all kinds of ways to get our partners to fill us: we yell, we pout, we withdraw, we flatter, we help, we lecture, we threaten, we complain.
We start each morning believing that if we are truly loved, the one who loves us will make all our nouns come true. But the day brings dismantling, sometimes just a floor or two and sometimes the entire structure ends up being razed. But whatever the damage, the direction of energy is the same. We start with an ideal expectation and spend our days subtracting from it. And by the time night falls we are left incomplete.
If you can’t use it to fill a hole, it will make you whole.
When we are verbing love, we stop looking for proof and start looking at our partners.
We also enlist the help of other verbs, like
notice (the length of his fingers, what makes him chuckle, the gentleness in his voice the fifth time he asks your son to obey, the perfect geometric shapes his hands form when he’s excited about a conversation . . . )
and
wonder (about his day, what he thinks about the headline you just read, the period of his childhood you don’t know much about, what it is he enjoys so much about that TV show, how he manages when he’s feeling scared . . .).
Start there and watch how naturally other verbs follow, verb that sound great but usually feel just out of reach. Empathize. Give. Delight.
The only way we can feel whole is by understanding that we are not noun-shaped holes.
The only way we can be filled with love is by love-ing.