Wishing for love is absolutely healthy

Attention, connection, respect, and affection are the bare minimum requisites in a relationship. If your relationship has these traits, it just means you are in a relationship, doesn’t mean it’s true love and doesn’t mean it will last or should, it’s a “congratulations, you reached level 1” of a 100-level game.

If it misses one or more of these bare minimum requirements, please value yourself more than requesting others to love you unconditionally, when they aren’t capable of such a feat.

And this is the catch. It’s really not about loving yourself first, it’s loving yourself enough to understand when others aren’t capable of loving you.

If love between humans is the bare minimum, what else is there to discover? Joy, bliss, true happiness, companionship, true friendship.

We keep demanding the bare minimum of each other and dissing those who aim for more than that, calling them needy and problematic and emotionally addicted. It’s a societal problem when we can’t even respond to love with affection and kindness. It’s strange when people love other humans, just for existing, when in fact, it’s the human-kindness requirement for a healthy and happy life.

The ability to love is one of the highest and most noble and also easiest things to do in human-to-human interaction. We close ourselves off so much that we think attention, obsession, and ownership are love. Those are not traits of love, those are traits of a wounded driven person who needs therapy.

Wishing and desiring to be loved is nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about, it’s a natural and healthy human characteristic. It’s actually what promotes healthy and natural interactions.

I recently started reopening myself up for normality in relationships and found the whole experience heartbreaking. Ghosting has become normality, between everyone, family and friends included, and we say this is normal? When asking for the simple act of replying to a text message, which is basically called being normal in interactions, is asking too much, being needy, demanding attention… When have we reached the place where common humanity is something to shame other humans for?

I don’t see any normal human interaction with people being silent and leaving in the middle of a conversation and demanding that it be considered normal. It’s just plain disrespect.

When did the bare minimum is considered enough to actually spend your life with someone? A bare minimum includes attention to when the person has ups and downs, that is called consideration. Includes affection and care, which is called caring. Interest!, interest in what the other person says and does. It’s also the bare minimum.

We are so hungry for connection that we neglect ourselves and our standards for the bare minimum of human interaction.

I started feeling guilty to ask my closest and oldest friends for support during a difficult time in my life. It’s when I realized they weren’t friends at all… the disrespect I got when I tried to have a conversation about it was so huge that I realized that the base of our relationship, the foundation, was disrespect and competition. Not really about caring for each other. I realized I accepted those friendships because I believed being on each other’s Facebook was enough to maintain an actual connection. It’s not. And it pains me to admit that I too failed with others who needed me.

I came to the realization that true friendship is really hard to find. I stopped accepting superficial friendships in my life and everyone vanished. I’m not even joking. I started putting the standard of involvement and affection, and nobody could take it. We start questioning what is wrong with ourselves to deserve no love at all, or the bare minimum possible. And everyone, everyone deserves love.

Instagram and TikTok will tell you that you love too much, that you care too much, that it’s all okay as long as you consider YOURSELF to be the unhealthy one if you actually demand the basic requisites for a healthy relationship, or worse, actually demand it from all your relationships. They tell you it’s preferable to love yourself, not because it’s actually a need in order to heal from all this dysfunction but also because it’s the healthiest thing to do, so you can spend your life accepting the bare minimum of yourself and others.

Needing sex is one thing, needing actual love is another. It’s natural to crave the type of intimacy of two souls who truly love one another, it’s healthy! And it’s healthy to crave true sensuality and not porn-mimicking sex lives. True sensuality is so rare these days, when did it become a thing to not have intimacy at all? People don’t even know what is intimacy. Touching, bare minimum. Pleasure, bare minimum. Love, bare minimum.

It’s so frustrating to say, as a coach, to my clients that reciprocity is also the bare minimum. They lie to themselves and to everyone else that what they have with others is good for them, but it’s clearly a mess. No relationship survives a foundation of the bare minimum.

It’s abusive to not answer when someone talks to you.

It’s abusive to have the disrespect to demand porn-like attitudes in bed.

It’s abusive to not love another person and waste their time believing you do. It’s abusive to pretend to love someone so you are not lonely dealing with yourself in therapy.

It’s freaking emotional abuse, people. And we call these, the minimum requirements?

And some will tell you you are too much for actually demanding healthy and honest interactions and human relationships. That it is too much to ask for the bare minimum, that you need to accept things as they are because unhealthiness is the normality.

Actually, I’ve come across people in my life who know that these are the bare minimum requirements for a relationship to flourish and provide these at the cost of nothing at all but to continue building healthy foundations in our relationships for the future. That is healthy, and I stumbled with myself wondering if they liked my message means they really like me as a person, how sad is that? But we all have this. We question if people in our lives even like us as the people we actually are.

I’m currently trying another social media experiment. If you follow me for a while, you know I occasionally do this.

Right now I’m being my absolute authentic self and I unfollowed everyone who I don’t really like or have a connection with. It was painful but liberating.

I’m using my social media for work purposes and occasionally to share personal stuff. My authenticity requires I share the absolute minimum of my personal life online. But… I’m not faking to be happy, I’m not faking relationships, and I’m not terrified of actually having standards and speaking my mind. Do you know what happened? Every like I used to have disappeared, new ones popped up, and now I know who actually cares and who actually values my authenticity. I started developing actual interactions with folks who I only know from the internet, actually, which become more of an actual relationship than most people I know offline.

I was talking to someone the other day, and I thanked them for being the few people on my Facebook friends list and actual person in offline life, who shares and supports my business, and she was very surprised and said it’s the basic requirement when friends have new businesses. That propelled me to write this article.

It’s actually or it’s supposed to be the minimum requirement in the basic foundation of everyone’s lives, to have the kindness of being human attached to their humankind-common-humanity. That means providing people in our lives with the bare minimum in our relationships without feeling too much or unhealthy for depending on others for interaction and affection — we all do, the closest the relationship, the more affection there is supposed to be. Are you depending on yourself for affection? It’s a basic human need, can you fulfill it, or do you need others?

We are so hungry for connection that we spend years with the wrong person because sometimes the relationship leaves the bare minimum requirements. That means usually, honesty, friendship, and companionship. Which is level 2 of a 100-level game.

And most of us stay there, not daring to ask for more or go further. A lot of actually marry those level 2 relationships. We don’t demand more because we can actually be alone if we do and that is too painful to bear.

I’ve decided for being alone for the time being, until I actually find and meet the person who can reach all the levels with me that I know are worthy of me and them. I think it’s disrespectful to be with someone we don’t actually love, and I think it’s disrespectful to steal someone else’s love of their life, you know? I think it’s a shiny resentment that we don’t always notice it’s there when someone is clearly still into their first love or something, and we calculate our ownership of the person. The heart belongs to who it belongs to, all else ends in heartbreak and disappointment. It was a life lesson for me with my last boyfriend to come to that conclusion, and it actually helped me a lot in having enough respect for myself (and for him) to not consider myself more important than who he actually loved.

I try to find the lesson of love in everything that happens to me. Sometimes it’s a lesson of love for and from others, sometimes it’s a lesson on self-love. But in essence, rediscovering myself, made me understand how I’ve neglected and self-abused in light of an idea of the different and shiny, of the new possession, of the porn-like attitude (which is grounded in previous abuse), which actually just stirred me away from my authenticity.

I’m a romantic person, deeply. I love romantic comedies and Disney movies. I’m a big defender of Disney love. Even if Prince Charming needs to try the shoe on every girl in the kingdom, he is still the love of her life in the end. That’s beautiful. I only watch romantic stuff on TV because it sets my butterflies-in-the-stomach mode on, and it helps me dream of a better world, where people actually love one another and are respectful. And this is actually the healthiest part of me saying: it’s okay to love and to be loved.

Authenticity is rooted in self-love and love for others, and those roots are always rooted with other roots, building a foundation. Nowadays, these kids don’t know what a healthy foundation of love is if their parents teach them that true love (the love they live in reality) is actually not true at all.

I’ve met adults and children with honest loving relationships and the spark in their eyes is completely different. It’s like they can take over the planet and create Heaven on Earth all by themselves. I had to fight hard for my own spark — and I don’t resent people who had loving parents, but I see my friends complaining about theirs when there is affection, kindness, and support. When I was growing up, I had to learn affection with other people, not my parents. I was doomed to be traumatized, because of the inability to even recognize love in others. I had to fight hard to learn what love is, and to recognize it in myself and others.

The trauma I’ve been through is a testament to my resilience and overcoming, not really about the lack of love. I’ve always felt I have enough love to give to everyone, and to myself, to sustain my life in loneliness until the right person comes along. I’m blessed to be this way, and it’s what I cherish most about myself.

My standards for being with others are not too high actually, I demand true love and all that comes with it. All else is stolen from other people who deserve true love as much as I do.

I don’t aim to steal attention or belonging. I know who my heart belongs to, and I’ve accepted life as it is. I have for a long time. The acceptance of this brings freedom because in clarity we see the truth. And it is healthy to wish for true love, the mingling of two souls in intimacy. It’s actually, the bare minimum.