When Lust Fades

We look for love to fill our lives to bring us to connection. We look for romance to prove love is something grand and larger than life. But so often what we call love is lust. We lust after another person. We lust after what life can offer. We lust after the intimacy that comes from connection. We romanticize the lust that catches each other's attention. We mistake lust for love and love for lust.

And sometimes... Sometimes the lust we feel grows into a connection that leads to love. The physical becomes the emotional. But sometimes lust fades away and we look for what's left behind. It can be friendship or love or even disconnection.

I look at love through such different eyes than I did when I was younger. I often mistook lust for love and missed the love that presented itself in quiet moments. I wanted to see some grand gesture that would sweep me off my feet yet I never trusted grand gestures. I wanted to believe that every offer of lust was an offer of love. Love and lust were so wrapped in my mind, deciphering the two often felt impossible.

Yet, I knew even then I could love without lusting. I also knew even then I could lust without loving.

Far too often I sought love in the arms of lust even when I didn't particularly like the person.

Many relationships begin with some element of lust that grows into love. I hadn't given this much thought until my Mom recently described her relationship with my Dad by saying "We got married in lust and fell in love."

I'd never considered my parents' relationship as beginning in anything but love even though I knew my own relationship began in lust and grew into love. I thought I loved him, but how could I have? I had no idea what love was at that point in my life. Still, I loved him to the best of my ability at that time, but I think I now offer love that is more loving and compassionate and real than at any time in my life. We share a love now that is more honest and less possessive. It is more liberating and understanding than demanding and constraining. It is less about an ideal of what love should be and more about what actually is. It's about defining our relationship ourselves and supporting each other rather than trying to fit some mold we had no say in creating. Our love has become about writing our own rules rather than forcing ourselves into society's ideal of what we should be.

I've come to understand that neither lust nor love are bad, but they also aren't the same thing as we're so often led to believe particularly by books and movies. Lust and love are part of the human experience. Lust and love lead to connections of their own specific ways. While it' beautiful when the two arrive together, it's also okay when they don't.

When lust brings two people together, love can grow if the people bring honesty to the table and work on connecting. But lust doesn't have to lead to love and often doesn't. Love doesn't necessarily lead to lust either. The important thing is to be honest about those feelings and how they interconnect or diverge.

When we're lucky the lust of youth grows into the love of maturity without sacrificing the lust that came first. The attraction and the intimacy borne from lust weave into the understanding and unity of love offering a complex and beautiful relationship that survives the challenges and growth of the individuals involved in the relationship.