falling in love v. loving

Falling in love can be wonderful, and a lot of fun. Loving the other around all of their impediments is work, the work of love, which is the work of life.  Do the hard work of working around conflicts, disapointments, hurt feelings and love.

I do this thing within myself in which I have a conscious sensation of my love being a neon beam that sometimes has to dodge around human imperfections, curve around the other's flaws but which steadfastly keeps going to reach its goal, which is to love the other.  I love that I do this, love that I can do it. I love loving.

I stumble. I have offloaded my pain onto someone I love, but never consciously. When I get caught in hard emotional pain, I think that I hurt someone I love because I trust that they will go on loving me. It's not right, to offload my pain on someone dear to me. I do it less and less.  It's also not right to punish me by shunning me when I have acted like the imperfect human everyone is.

Anyone who has chosen to shun me forever because I acted from my human imperfection never loved me. Love stays, to quote a poem an acquaintance wrote for his girlfriend but, weirdly, shared with me. And, gosh golly, it hurts so much to realize "oh, he didn't love me at all".  I can get so bogged down in feeling my pain when someone I have loved severs ties with me that I fail to see that the person shunning me is wrong, unjustified and even behaving cruelly, projecting their weaknesses, their inability to love around impediments, onto me. And then I do it to myself, blame myself. Bah humbug. I have never done anything that justified banishment, shunning me from someone's life.