Q+A: How Do I Be Loving Towards Everybody?

Is it necessary? How the fuck do I do that?

How do I be loving towards everybody? Is it necessary? How the fuck do I do that?

photograph by Emy Dossett @salty_see

I enjoy reading about cultivating and sustaining relationships and listening to relational-themed podcasts. I often wonder if I was born this way, or if I was simply shimmied into thinking that Love is suuuper interesting. Either way, the fact remains: How people do the dance, and how our psyches relate to one another, excites me deeply. On a personal level, I’m building knowledge in this area so that I can someday offer a relatively grounded version of my emotional self to someone (and because I’m not currently working with a therapist).

I went down to Mexico sight unseen, mas o menos. When I arrived, I knew four people there—my friends Taye and Dan being two of them. We had met only once, almost a year before, but even so we couldn’t wait to see each other.  Over the course of the next few months, we grew closer as I became a trusted third wheel to their romantic partnership.

Being in this position often gets a bad rap; at the very least, there’s an air of “Eeyore” about it. I’ve never heard anyone gleefully shout, “I’m the third wheel today!” But with them, that’s how I felt: gleeful, secure, expansive. I’ve extracted a lot from my self-curated School of Love, but my favorite articles and audio stories couldn’t convey the intimacy of sitting backseat to Taye and Dan’s relationship. Sometimes you really do need to get out in the field. 

Whenever I needed a night off from the jungle—or to use Wi-Fi and snack on the treats Taye remembered to bring from the States—I claimed the spare bedroom in their shared apartment by the beach. In the mornings that followed a sleepover, I was acutely aware of my presence in their space and careful not to encroach on the intimacy of their habits. I sat quietly behind my laptop or book and watched, with childlike wonder, whoever had first arisen gently pause their morning routine to greet the emerging sleepyhead with physical touch and a kiss. I had never seen anything like this before, such ease in connection, nor could I recall practicing it in my previous domestic partnerships. I’ve never lived with two parents. 

“Didn’t you just see each other?” I remember thinking. That was before Dan told me about their intentional separation and reunion rituals: embracing each other at the start of each day, before anything else, and fucking as soon as possible after a period of being apart. I noticed their conscious maintenance of synchronicity (I literally took notes), ensuring that the ecosystem of their love remained symbiotic. 

I found equally pertinent lessons in their moments of strife. I witnessed the perils of their neglecting or forgetting these rituals, when having “off” days, or under the stress of their “workflow”, or from the distraction of an unexpected friend in town. They were both guilty of letting these rituals slide.

One evening Taye surprised all of us, herself included, when she snapped at Dan with hostility for a task he intentionally left incomplete. With Taye’s words, few but sharp, the air left the room. Dan’s decision was principled, and one I didn’t find entirely unreasonable, though Taye considered it trivial, sloppy. 

Even though it wasn’t my ass in the hot seat, I didn’t want to be there anymore; I wondered if this rift was my queue to scoot. Unphased by my spectating, Taye and Dan stayed present with each other and worked patiently towards repair, so I stayed too. From the safe distance of my voyeurism, I was able to reflect on parallel moments of contention with past partners, and in doing so realized that a sharp tongue is not the way I want to show up anymore. 

On another occasion, I observed Taye wrestle, pin, and submit her resistance to one of Dan’s habits. His trend towards this vice wasn’t causing any harm, but it was still one that Taye deemed unattractive. Even so, I carefully listened as she voiced the decision to release herself from judgment. 

When I asked her if it was really that easy, she swiftly replied, “Who my partner is on his own time is none of my fucking business. Who we are together is the only thing on my agenda.” I thought about times in the past where the temptation to judge, nitpick, or mold a partner of mine had been strong. I wondered if an obedience to preferences is what I want love in practice to feel like, and I remembered occasions when my obedience to a partner's demands felt like a prerequisite for their acceptance of me. 

How do I be loving towards everybody? Is it necessary? How the fuck do I do that?

At some point, I will come across someone that I find very annoying and self-serving. At some point, likely unbeknownst to me (though hopefully not anymore), I’ll also be just as annoying and self-serving as we’re all capable of—Taye and Dan included.

Being with them made the circumstances and pitfalls of my past relationships uniquely vivid. Without the conflict being my personal, immediate context, for the first time I saw that nobody is a good actor all of time. Taye and Dan take turns disappointing one another; they each have their own dog houses. It’s their efforts to turn softly towards each other during moments of contention that liberated my burden of justifications, those that I’ve used for not loving people. 

Who do I think I am? Who am I not to be loving? Who made me the keeper of the flame? 

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When I was younger, I once asked my aunt why she was a vegetarian. With unforgettable frankness, she said, “There’s just no good reason not to be.” 

This is not that. I can easily think of reasons to withhold love and acceptance from people. People can be unreasonable, inconsistent, hypocritical, and downright dirty. People fail to replace the toilet paper roll, people cut in line, people hurt so bad they decide to hurt another. But you (we!) are also people, and if I’m being reasonable, this means you (I!) occasionally embody these things as well. 

This feels sticky to accept, at first, but I invite you to let it ooze over your being like a universal molasses. At times, we’re all terrible! So with this in mind, perhaps the circumstances are exactly like my aunt said. Maybe we should all try to be loving towards everybody because there’s just no good reason not to be. 

I can hear you already, “BUT WHAT ABOUT MURDERERS AND RAPISTS AND POLITICIANS AND MY VERY BAD ROOMMATE AND MY TOXIC EX-BOYFRIEND??!!”

What about them? Does hating them make them go away? Does punishment change their behavior? I’m reminded of something Mari Andrew wrote in their newsletter earlier this month: “The thing about getting jaded and resentful is that it only punishes you and no one else.”

My desire to bring love into me is about me, and no one else. I can’t speak for you; maybe you love the way vengeance, spite, and exclusion lands in your body. While I believe feelings like these occur naturally, my experience of holding them for too long feels like I’m metamorphosing into a dense, impassable turd. I don’t have much time here; I want to soak up every morsel of beauty offered (i.e. clouds, friends, rainbows, kisses). I am so much spongier when my body feels like a smile.

Here’s the thing: You do not have to be successful at loving everybody. You can think about what I’ve written here, attempt to shift thought patterns around, and still struggle to conjure warm feelings. You can also disregard this approach and live like a hater with a sack full of grudges. When I’m having a hard time embracing others, it helps me to consider what my resistance really signifies. 

Usually, it is one of the following:

-Judgment. When this rings true, I’ll ask myself, “Since when did I become the arbiter of what is morally just or otherwise? Do I really want to live a life Should-ing all over everybody?”

-Control. In trying to control the performance of others to suit my wants, I stop and ask myself, “Do other people need to be different before I can feel good? Does pulling my benevolence from the table help this situation? Does withholding love get me closer to my desired outcome for myself, for this person, for humanity?”

On Saturday I asked my housemate Lucia what she thought about this question as we picked off the pistachios from a carton of mixed nuts. She said the following:

“Being loving towards everyone is not about opening my heart to everyone. It’s about bringing love to what is arising. To love is a verb. In indigenous languages it is based on the animacy of life. When I feel triggered, angry, disappointed, resentful, or avoidant towards somebody, is the solution to say “I should love this person!”? What if the feeling is less I have to love someone and more I am going to be loving in every moment. 

What does it look like to bring care and grace to each unfolding day, agnostic of the characters or setting? Sometimes it helps to practice by not orienting love towards specific people or things.”

We’ve all met people who love everybody. They float around backyard barbecues glowing and nodding enthusiastically at everyone with way too much eye contact. Their clothes are loose, they have the loudest laugh, their hands will inevitably rub everybody’s shoulders. I used to feel especially hard-edged when characters like this would emerge. I’d wonder if I was dead inside and question if they were being for real. In retrospect, I realize I was threatened not by their potential phoniness, but by an unabashed attempt to bring love to the occasion, feigned or genuine. I now realize they’re just performing something that previously felt wholly inaccessible.

Dearest readers, love is a practice; we don’t fall into it. We cannot take it for granted and act like loving everybody is easy, nor can we scoff at the possibility of it for ourselves. Others will disappoint us, sometimes without remorse, and we will stumble too. We don’t have to let this reality add resistance to how we move through the world, if only to help us carry a lighter load. Eventually there might be extra room in your grief sack/grudge sack/a-lot-of-leftover-feelings sack to include the world in your moments. 

Love,

Anna