In my unlearning — and in forming an understanding of the kinds of love and energy that make sense and feel safe to me — I am having to unlearn a lot of the scary love that shaped me into someone who both accepted and offered scary love.
In the love (the verb) that I am now learning, the thing I refer to as “badass love” – sacrifices for others. It does not sacrifice others for any reason.
While wholesome love is safe, steady, and nourishing, badass love is that same love under pressure — willing to take a stand, risk vulnerability, and accept the responsibility that comes with having power, influence, or status.
Because having the ability to choose differently matters.
Badass love has grit. I understand it as healthy love capable of tolerating difficulty without sacrificing dignity, honesty, or another person’s humanity. It is merciful — refusing to leverage status or rightness as a weapon.
Badass Love Has Grit
I have witnessed badass love in remarkably unremarkable things.
Doing a kind thing when nobody will know you did it.
Helping when helping is inconvenient and opting out would be preferable.
Accepting some discomfort, delay, or less for yourself so someone else can have what they need.
Continuing to show up in service when there is no praise coming, no acknowledgment, perhaps not even gratitude.
Doing something useful for someone without keeping the receipt for a future argument.
Taking a relational risk because healing matters.
Being more willing to absorb the cost of doing what feels loving -than to collect credit for having done it.
And maybe that is where love reveals the most about itself: when something prized is threatened by what is true.
When the status quo could be easily sustained if one person were simply eliminated from it.
Evidence of Love
For me, love cannot live only in the explanation someone gives for their behavior. Love has to show up in what they are willing to do to another human being in order to remain right or have their way.
I keep coming back to something much less romantic:
Love is a verb, not a fucking feeling or an intention.
Calling something loving does not make it so.
Love and character seem well reflected in how much collateral damage a person is willing to cause or accept in defense of their position. I am all for wholesome badass love. Apparently, it is not for everyone.
Have you ever known someone who felt completely certain of their own rightness and entitlement while also understanding themselves as deeply loving? I am certainly no expert, but I have a hard time seeing deep entitlement as a loving posture. Naahmsaaayyyin?
