Contracts in the name of love

004

Uncomfortably different - it feels as if this admission is crashing straight into my most carefully hidden wall of the concept about love, relationships, and agreements. As if I’ve been preaching “love is not a concept” but still tried to push it into one anyway, just to supposedly feel safe. But it’s exactly that safety - the one I actually want to hold within myself, and also thought I had already understood - that doesn’t exist inside a concept at all, because by definition it simply cannot belong there.

But what kind of safety, actually? The kind that finds another person’s word safer than one’s own sufficiency to carry ‘the now’, no matter how it may change or be? The kind that hands all responsibility over to the concept and to the other person just to be able to relax because it feels too unsafe not to hand it over? Too unsafe to simply experience what is and taking responsibility for what will be?

To answer yourself these questions, and to meet another person on this level, with all the values you thought were so clear - feels like meeting your next inner wall and tearing it down. The grande finale, the final boss.

Now we’re actually talking about the love I always thought I was talking about. The love that has no rules, except that you must meet in truth. Pure, naked, almost awkward. No concept telling you what’s allowed and what’s not. No ‘you can, you cannot’, no ‘allowed, no forbidden’. No frame, no guidelines, no pre-chewed path. Instead, a state that both demands and offers you the chance to meet yourself in complete nakedness, again and again, even when it feels almost threatening.

It doesn’t let you lean on the familiar framework where you could rest or hide. It doesn’t allow you to blindly fall back into old patterns, familiar roles, because every insincere or unconscious act would have its consequence felt immediately in the field. It would move freely, beyond every old framework. That framework you had locked yourself into, because your still-missing awareness didn’t yet allow you to see that you stayed there only because you thought that’s where it’s safe and right.

As I grasp what I’m writing here, I realize that this was my own supposedly safe frame - my own narrative about love and relationships. It terrified me to give someone the space to decide, every single moment anew, for or against me. I thought I felt safe when each of my encounters was clearly defined, bound to a rulebook that comes with the concept that follows.

Which is nothing other than an agreement, a contract pretending to both of us how exactly this bond is supposed to look and unfold. And if this contract isn’t kept properly, at least I get to throw all of my pain and frustration at someone else and make them responsible for it. Which, at the core, just means giving away my responsibility. The responsibility for my own wound, my inner world - the one that never truly believed it could be truly chosen. Every day, every moment, again and again. The one that didn’t really believe someone would want to stay, precisely because of me. The one that wanted to believe the promise of another more than it wanted to believe itself.

And then?

And then you end up in agreements, in contracts - but not in love. Because you neither meet yourself truthfully, nor can you meet the other honestly.

How could you, when the frame you want to quickly put yourself into - because the undefined openness feels too unsafe, too raw, too wild - keeps you from truly facing?

Because the frame smooths over, fogs, and deflects everything that shouldn’t be softened. It blocks the mirror - the one you’d have to face if the edge of the frame didn’t catch you first.

You blindly follow the concept, rubbing up against the conditions it carries, instead of facing the mirror of what you actually feel and sense. Conditions shaped only by how others before you were conditioned, and then by yourself.

Closed, open, defined as “just sex” or “just friends” - every label gives you a framework you cling to with all your might. In doing so, you limit yourself and make yourself almost incapable of change, because you follow the concept, mostly unconsciously.

And with it comes the judgment of acting good or right, being wrong or having failed, of ducking away and taking no responsibility - because after all, it was defined as undefined.

Every concept, no matter how free it may seem, leaves you unfree within yourself.

Because you don’t meet yourself, you meet an imposed, pre-made frame where you either win or fail.

But if we talk about true love, it cannot exist there.
Love doesn’t know success or failure.
Love doesn’t know right or wrong.
Love doesn’t know force, or must.

Love is.
Love is unconditional - free, wild, without a frame. Love doesn’t orient itself by any conditions, nothing on the outside. You can only feel true love within.

Love orients itself by nothing but the inner. It throws light on what is true and what is not. Love stands there, in purest clarity and truth. It has no desire, except to be. Love doesn’t test, but it exposes. It allows no masks, no games, no hiding, and no escape from responsibility.

Love is naked, pure, full.
Love just wants to be - always, but it can only expand where there is truth, where there is clarity.

So true love cannot be pressed into any insincere concept. But it can unfold where you continually encounter each other truthfully and consciously choose each other, without knowing what will follow - what will remain or leave, what will be allowed or not. Love is not a contract. Love is the daily choice to show up in truth, together.

It challenges you to find the trust within yourself - in you, with you. It challenges you to meet yourself again and again. To face what you run from, what you fear, what you fight to hide, what you don’t dare to dream. It shows you where you still avoid yourself at all costs, where you keep yourself small, caught in constructs because you don’t yet trust yourself to live in full responsibility. It is the love that no longer lets you betray or lie to yourself.

The wild love that sets you free and at the same time binds you more faithfully than any concept ever could. Because it comes in truth, from the conscious decision to really want it. With yourself, and with the other. Every moment, anew, to choose the now.

And I truly believe that this is the real freedom we all so desperately desire in life and love. To be able to be ourselves, to meet another honestly and to feel wholly loved for who we truly are.

Without masks, without proving, without the constant tension of giving.

And even though this challenges every narrative I believed in, every insecurity I clung to about what defines love, and even as my head and body screams SOS from old fears, I know and feel that this is the only true form of love.

Pure, raw, uncontrollable, and at the same time truer, stronger, more alive than any frame could ever be.

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