Does knowing me more mean loving me less?

An open and honest essay on unconditional love and being a 'good' person.

I’ve been thinking a lot about being seen.

Not in the outwardly facing, dare-to-be-different and bold kind of way but in the form of being perceived, known, understood even for who you are at your core—the good, the bad and the absolutely fucking ugly—while simultaneously, in some inversely-adjacent related fashion, thinking about whether I truly am a good person, as if the two go hand in hand together.

Maybe they do.

Being a hopeless romantic by nature has shaped my expectations of love in the most grandiose of forms. I believe in miracles and time-trodden clichés; in the romanticization of strangers falling in love across crowded subway platforms and the assurance in the existence of soulmates.

But by design, this delusion of grandeur for love in the highest forms, has also created an innate, irrefutable dismissal of love when it isn’t perfect and ‘just right’ and correct.

Or really—when I’m neither perfect nor ‘just right’ nor correct.

There’s a narrative we’ve been told that the beauteous aspect of love is its unconditionally. That someone, somewhere, will meet you at your fallible, fragmented state and still deem you whole. They will consider the unfinished, unpolished versions of you to be just as necessary for your identity as those we place front and center for the rest of the world to see. But does it ever scare anyone else to open yourself so truly and so unabashedly when maybe your winning qualities don’t outweigh the losing ones? (No? Just me? Fuck.)

Call it what you will: maybe this is just an outcry from someone who has, at times, a love-hate relationship with their own self-concept, or maybe it’s something (I think) a few humans, who have a proficiency in introspection, secretly dwell on. Whatever it is, I hope you give me grace for the sheer honesty of what you’re about to read.

Sometimes, I think I’m cruel. I have a penchant for hotheadedness that when it arises, feels almost like an out-of-body experience. What’s worse is that I—or at least, my higher self—knows when I’m starting to blow things out of proportion. But still, I’m watching the real-life version of me bubble and boil until she blows up to the point of no return. She’s Mount Vesuvius on a Fifty First Dates plot line: no warning, laying dormant until the absolute last minute before she blows up everything within the blast radius, and then repeat. I could easily chalk that up to genetics (my biological father has the same affinity for explosive reactions and my mother is a triple Aries) but that feels like too much of a cop out. No. This… this feels like a choice born out of inevitability. It’s inextricably embedded into my DNA; so much that it seeps out of my pores and I poke and I prod and I probe into it every day until one day, it felt like such a necessary part of my identity and routine: playing with the fire that scorches out of me so I wouldn’t burn alive inside.

I also rank highly on the neuroticism scale. I’m wound up so tightly, it feels like one wrong misstep might just send me over the edge: needless to say, I’m definitely overstimulated more often than not.

Pair all of that with a proclivity for words and well… It can get dangerous. Words become the tool I sharpen my tongue with, forged with the fire that bleeds out of me like an avalanche and laced with the jitters of chronic unease. It’s as if my mouth is loaded with poisoned ammunition and the metaphorical gun is being held by someone that looks like me and thinks like me, but isn’t me. And before I can even think to consider that I’m not ever shooting to kill, not even maim, me who is not me tapes her finger to the trigger and fixes her mouth to form words that would turn Medusa to stone.

But I say all of this to say that I know what my not-so-great qualities are. I know these have never been the traits I highlighted on dating apps or charmed men with on first dates. Obviously. But I’ve been in long term relationships, and am currently in one right now, where I catch myself thinking in moments like these: Does knowing me more mean loving me less?

Like I said before: I have an innate, irrefutable dismissal of love when it isn’t perfect. And sometimes I worry that because I am so far from perfect—still healing and growing and bandaging up the broken parts of me—that I’m harder to love than most people. This feeling hums in the background of my life, where I am surrounded by love in all of its forms, and causes me to question whether I’m truly deserving to be graced by its presence.

Would they still respect me if they knew how utterly fallible I am? Would they gasp in shock and horror if they saw the extreme emotional states I was capable of? Would they still love me despite them?

For someone that wears their heart on their sleeve, I’m also someone who keeps their cards close to their chest. Because knowing me beyond the scope of what is palatable and acceptable is an intimate understanding of the smaller version of me who is exposed in their rawness, plasma and trauma and agony and all, who can’t stomach the thought of someone looking away. Would they avert their eyes from the sight of something so egregious and ugly? Or would they maintain their disposition and still choose to find the soul within that grotesque mess of blood and bone?

I know that conclusions should relieve some sort of tension for readers but to be quite honest, I’m still working on developing a good resolution for myself when it comes to these questions. I’m still redefining what it means to be imperfect and deserving, still working with hypnotists and therapists to get to the root of all of these big feelings, and still living day by day to be better than who I was the day before. I wrote this in the hopes that maybe someone out there has wondered these same things and have been waiting for someone else to put it into words. And to that I say, you are not alone.

always and truly,
samantha