The Heart Wants What it Wants
Libby offers an uncomfortable but necessary reality check: love alone doesn't conquer all.
Transcript
In this line of work that I do, I have people writing into me or setting up sessions with me all the time, who are looking for help, who are struggling, and sometimes they reach out because they want something to be away that it just isn't. As an example, recently I had a call with someone who is monogamous and has been in a monogamous relationship for most of their adult life, and they fell in love with someone else and they, through that experience, realized that they both want that new person and they want their current partner both. And so they really wanna change the agreement that they have with their partner, their current partner, around monogamy, so that the other partner, the other person that they're falling in love with has the opportunity to be in their life as well as a romantic partner.
And what they were looking for from me was some help on how to introduce the idea to their current partner and how that transition might possibly go smoothly. And they were looking for from me what a lot of people are looking for from me, which is to help them see an opportunity that they don't currently see, or a way of looking at things that shifts their perspective. They're hoping that I can get them what they want without the potential catastrophe that they may be seeing looming in front of them. And sometimes I can do that, but sometimes though where you are is stuck and there isn't actually a way to get exactly what you want without it costing you a lot. In this case, as I was talking to this person, they revealed that their partner is currently in a real mental health struggle and has been just beginning to pull themselves out of a dark hole.
And, you know, they, they've barely got a toe hold on, you know, functioning well right now. And I just, you know, I don't often give like straight up advice to people who reach out to me, but in this case I did. And I just said, you know what? I don't see how you can do this and have this go well. I just don't see how it can happen. it sucks, but I just don't think you can have what you wanna have without it being disastrous for your current relationship. And unfortunately this isn't unusual, you know, we're often sold the idea that if we're polyamorous, if we just open ourselves to the idea of polyamory, we don't have to have any more limitations on how we relate. You know, we can quote unquote have our cake and eat it too. And again, sometimes that's true, but sometimes you can't.
Actually, an example would be the partner who like straight up cheated on their spouse and their spouse caught them, but then they decided to come clean. And they're in love with this person, and so they wanna be with that affair partner while also keeping their existing relationship and family intact. That might not work. Or there's someone who wrote to me who has a young child with one on the way and is planning a big move in a few months, but in this moment they're also realizing their polyamorous. And so they wanna explore polyamory. And while their partner has said they're open to the idea, they've also said they just don't have the bandwidth for the work that that would take right now. Or there was the couple who reached out to me who are both married with kids to other people and have very busy lives, but feel deeply anchored to one another and are finding it really hard to find a way to find the amount of time and opportunity to connect that reflects the depth of what they feel for each other.
Or there's the person who really only wants to do kitchen table polyamory, but they can't stand their metamor and the feeling is mutual. And thus there are just some severe limitations on how much they can integrate into their partner's life. Or there's the person who wakes up early and goes to bed early, but their partner is a night owl who works all night and sleeps all day. And so they have a hard time finding time together when one of them isn't tired, even though they really love each other. And having other partners on top of that just makes it really, really hard to have enough time to have a real relationship. Or there's the person who has just so much going on in their life that they can't commit to any new relationships, even though they've just met somebody that they have fallen madly in love with and they think might really be more compatible for them than anybody they've ever met before.
There are so many situations like this, what I hear sometimes from people when they are wanting something that when they tell it to me, I think in my head, this doesn't really totally make sense for your life and would have a high cost to the other things that you're saying are important to you. What they say is something along the lines of the heart wants what it wants. And when I hear that phrase, my mind immediately goes to Woody Allen, who is actually famous for saying that. But saying that in response to questions about why he would leave his wife, Mia Farrow to marry his 18 year old adopted daughter, Woody Allen, who groomed and molested his other adopted daughter while she was a very young child, and then arguably also groomed and molested the adopted daughter that he eventually married. So I kind of cringe when I hear the heart wants what it wants, because that phrase was used to justify serious harm by a man who has never been truly accountable for his actions.
There's also a Selena Gomez song with the title, the Heart Wants What It Wants and she sings, you might be Right, but I don't care. There's a million reasons why I should give you up, but the heart wants what it wants. It's obvious from the lyric that what she's saying is that love and attraction should win over logical thought or what's best for her or other people. The truth is, while, if you've listened to this show, I hope you know, I am a stand for love and I am a stand for love being a deeply healing and transformative experience. I am not though a stand for letting love or desire or dreams or deep longings or even something like realizing you've been polyamorous your whole life. Justify letting those things blindly leading you down a path that is destructive to the other things that are important to you.
The truth is, sometimes what my heart wants is a dairy queen blizzard, but I'm lactose intolerant and my mom has type two diabetes, so I usually refrain. I don't refrain because of some moral opposition to dessert. See my episode on moral licensing, I will eat the out of some dark chocolate or cherry pie, or, oh my God, I just found out about, trader Joe's Dairy Free Yuzu Ripple Ice Cream. Holy shit, I, we can't even talk about it. Okay, but I refrain from Dairy Queen because the cost of me consuming a blizzard, even though I really want it, especially heath bar blizzard man, so good. but the cost of doing that, for those of you who are lactose intolerant, I don't need to go into detail or if you have a partner who's lactose intolerant you probably know, but trust me, if you don't know it isn't pretty and that cost is higher than the pleasure that I will get out of eating it.
And so too, it can be with relationships sometimes your heart really does want polyamory, but you're also long-term partnered and co-parents and property sharing with a monogamous person who you have committed your life to, who you love, who you cherish, who you don't want to destroy your relationship with, who has said they can't possibly accept that relationship configuration. And it's not because they're fearful or small minded or controlling, but it's because their dream for their life was to have one partner who's only partner with them. I am not saying by the way, that if you are polyamorous in a relationship with a monogamous person, that you should always stay with that person or that you have to be monogamous. Sometimes it is too costly to stay with someone you love, but who won't let you be fully you, then it is to break up and fully embrace your polyamorous self.
But either way, your heart wants incompatible things and maybe it cannot have both. Maybe your need to be polyamorous outweighs your need to be with your partner. There's a lot of energy for that nowadays. Go be free. Go be who you are. Go be with who you love. And if that's the most important thing, then go for that. You know, we only have this one wild and precious life, and I believe that, but I also just wanna say that sometimes the right choice for you might be to look at reality and understand that going for something you desire may have two greater cost to the other things that you also desire. And I wanna just say it's a perfectly valid choice to choose the commitment that you've made, the person that you love, the things that you want with that person over this other part of yourself.
We have multiple parts, they all want different things. Sometimes we have to choose, and it sucks, it sucks that there are sometimes these difficult situations where the price you have to pay to have what you want might not be worth getting it, but to just go ahead and pay it anyway and just hope or even demand that it will work out for everyone, just because you don't wanna have to pay that price can be really destructive. What's really hurtful is to say to someone who you know, you've decided you're polyamorous, they've said that doesn't work for them, is to insist that they change or they don't love you, or they're not willing to accept your authentic self. That's not fair. Like some people don't want what you want and you don't get to force them into it just because that's what you want.
And like, I, I get it. Why sometimes when your heart really does get filled with this longing or this deep attraction or falling in love, like being an NRE, our culture has a real energy towards going for new deep, beautiful, exciting, thrilling, romantic love at all costs and prioritizing it above everything else. And when you're in NRE, it is a powerful experience. You meet someone new, you encounter something exciting and alivening, you discover a side of yourself that you didn't know you had. It's intoxicating. You are lighting up all kinds of neurochemicals that push you into a seeking behavior. And with that can come a, a single mindedness. And when it comes to partnering, the goal of those brain chemicals just to be clear, is to get you to bone long enough so that you make a baby and stay together long enough to get that baby to where it can probably survive without both parents.
And then it wears off, which is why while I am a stand for love and romantic love and getting swept off your feet and feeling all those deep feelings, eventually those, the intensity of all of that wears off. And then you have to just be with the reality of the choices you've made when you were in that state of that single-minded bliss. And those choices may have consequences. There are a lot of things that I just simply wouldn't do in the throes of NRE. Like I wouldn't get a tattoo, I wouldn't sell my home. I wouldn't make radical changes to my life structure. I probably wouldn't end any of my anchor relationships. I also think that a lot of what it means to be in love is to actually be in love with who you are when you're with someone and how you feel about yourself when you are seen through someone else's eyes, who is seeing you a new, who is meeting you and is excited about you for the first time.
And I wanna invite people to appreciate love for that, for it being this experience of connecting to yourself and also to connecting to something pure and beautiful about just being a human and having an open heart and really connecting to the depth of that feeling of that open-heartedness. And I also wanna offer that just because you're feeling those things, sometimes the most loving thing to do is to actually not bring that experience to its full fruition and actually change things such that you have to be with someone. There are a couple of movies where this is actually how the movie ends. Casablanca is one of them. you know, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman don't end up together. She ends up with the steady safe guy and it makes sense. or this other movie that I loved called once, which, stars Glen Hansard, as this, you know, kind of starving musician who falls in love with this woman who falls in love with his music and they don't end up together.
And I kind of love what she says, at the end when he like offer, when he asks her, you know, do you wanna, you know, come and make out and hook up? And she's like, what would be the point? What would be the point? We're not gonna be together. I love these movies and I love those choices that the characters make because to me those feel like grownup decisions instead of being careless and just throwing everything away for the sake of passion, even though the love that these characters feel for each other is real and it's palpable. And as an audience member, you kind of wanna be able to have them consummate it. It's actually really cool that they don't, and it doesn't make the love that they feel any less real, any less important. Like, you know, that the characters have been changed forever because of meeting each other and being in each other's lives.
And that makes me think of the true originator of the phrase the heart wants what it wants, which wasn't Woody Allen as it turns out. But Emily Dickinson, Dickinson wrote the Heart What wants, what It Wants, when writing to a friend, Mary Bowles, whose husband was going to be away for a very long time, Dickens wants to be consoling to her friend, but what she writes is when the best is gone, I know that other things are not of consequence. The heart wants what it wants or else it does not care. Not to see what we love is very terrible and talking doesn't ease it and nothing does, but just itself. What she's saying here is when our heart can't have what it wants, it can be painful and there may be nothing that can actually make that better. I think of the times when I really love someone, but they just couldn't reciprocate it in the way that I felt it, or it just wasn't possible for us to be together in the way that made sense.
I think that it can actually be even harder when love is requited, like when you both feel it, but it's just not possible to make it work because of structural things or incompatibilities or other parts of your relational ecosystem not being compatible or conflicting commitments, et cetera. But those things matter. They're not nothing love doesn't always conquer all. At some point you have to decide what are the things that you're gonna prioritize and choose and decide are important enough to let go of the things and grieve the things that maybe you can't have and then let go.
And that doesn't mean you have to squash the love. I don't do that. there are people that I've fallen in love with who I know I will never be with, and I still feel the love. I mean, there definitely is pain in not being able to have what I want or be with someone that I cherish or let the love expand into my life the way that it's expanding in my chest. But a few years ago I wrote this about this whole experience. It has come up in a couple of recent conversations, and maybe it bears saying, in case you need to hear it today. Love is both a feeling and an action. The act of loving is in service of others, honoring their growth, their needs, their boundaries, their beingness. To actively love someone is to center them. You enjoy it because of the feeling of love that goes with it.
The act of love is an expression of your heart, but it is only through your actions that other people feel. The love that you have for them, love as a feeling is for you. It is something you get to enjoy. And it is an expression of your heart and who you are and who you want to be in the world, because the love that you feel as opposed to the love that you do is for you. You can feel love and not have it returned, and that can still be beautiful and real and something sacred and precious. The act of loving someone who doesn't or can't love you or doesn't or can't love you in the same way that you love them or in the same amount looks different than loving someone who wants to receive all the love you have to give and gives it back in return.
You can still act with love. The act of love in these cases is more likely to be things like respecting boundaries, asking for consent and honoring limitations. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to create lots of space. Learn to accept what is offered to you, celebrate what you have and ask for no more. Sometimes the act of love is to distance yourself from people you love who can't love you in the way you need them to, in this case, loving them is not allowing them to hurt you. Even then you can still feel the love you have for them and hold that feeling. It still counts as love. The actions just look different in all these cases. Love can just be just like any other emotion. It's not wrong you can allow it and allow it to lift you up and fill you. Love doesn't have to look a certain way to be love. And the feeling of love doesn't have to mean certain things must happen in order for it to have been real. It can be wonderful all on its own. The feeling is and always was yours.
I'm, I'm saying this because I want you to know, know, even if your heart can't have what it wants, you don't have to harden your heart. It can actually be pretty exquisite to live in the tension between what our heart feels and what our heart wants. I'm saying all this because in my years of being a coach and a leader amongst polyamorous folks, a thing I've seen over and over again that has created a lot of pain for a lot of people is insisting on making something work that doesn't actually work. Just because you want it. And again, I get that. And I'm not saying don't try, I mean for goodness sakes, I think sometimes you just gotta try. You just gotta see if you can. But sometimes things just aren't really meant to go together and you have to make difficult choices.
And again, most people who are gonna be hyping polyamory to the masses don't want you to know this. But I actually spend a lot of my time in my relational landscapes saying no to things and being very careful about not just like even partner selection, although that's a big one for me for sure. But also even just thinking about like how I'm gonna spend my time and who I'm gonna spend it with. Like, I'm just really careful about that. And some of that is because like the more love you create in your life, you know, all of those things in, you know, for me at least can involve commitments of varying degrees. And there's only so much of me to go around. Some things just don't work and aren't possible. And, this is where it's so important to be aware of your capacity and honor what is possible.
And sometimes that means your heart not getting exactly what it wants. I'm gonna close this episode, not with any kind of cheery chipper action steps or anything you need to do. This is just more of a mindset that I want to invite you into and have you be aware of. when you don't get what you want. I mean, we're all grownups here. We know how that works. You deal with disappointment and grief and you go through grief process and you move through it. And I hope that the thing that can help is, again, turning toward yourself and turning towards the love that you felt or feel and honoring that part of you that came alive. And maybe that's the best that there can be. So to recap, you know, sometimes a situation really just can't work, no matter how much you might want it, no matter how beautiful it might be. Sometimes reality and your dreams just don't line up and that really does happen. It really is true. Sometimes there are hard choices to make and a path to suffering is not accepting and honoring reality and acting accordingly. I wanna encourage you to shift your mindset about that love conquers all and the heart wants what it wants because sometimes that is used to justify creating a lot of actual harm in your relational landscape. Honoring the love that you feel can be a way to soothe the part of you that desperately wants what it wants, because the love that you feel, whether it's manifested into actual relationship or not, is beautiful, amazing heart opening and worthy of your celebration and your grief.
