How to Be Alone by Lane Moore

Author:Lane Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

SO YOUR FAMILY DICTATES YOUR ROMANTIC FUTURE? WHAT A FUN PUNISHMENT!

We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. . . . Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment.

—BELL HOOKS, ALL ABOUT LOVE

I’ve internalized so many of the messages we’ve all been fed about how much your family and your childhood dictate the love you receive as an adult. People will say, “You’ll attract someone like your parents,” so if you have great parents who are loving and in love, yay, you win! But if you have absent parents or you never knew your parents or your parents were abusive, do you attract ghosts or no one or abusers? Because that seems unfair as hell. You already suffered through not having that baseline of love and support and now you’re just screwed and will never experience it because you were born into the wrong place? What the shit, life? Not cool. Or people who say, “No one will ever love you as much as your mom,” which might be comforting to people who have great moms but is a powerfully harmful statement for literally everyone else. So if your mom didn’t exist or didn’t or couldn’t love you, you will never be loved? AWESOME. Great. Just what every unloved little kid wants to hear: Remember how you weren’t loved as a kid? Now you’ll stay that way until you die!!!

This also goes for “Date a man who loves his mom,” or “Date someone who comes from a good family.” Because I know what you’re trying to say and I do look for both of those things in a partner, based on my background and the idea that I need someone with a stable attachment style, so that one of us is consistently chill. But it also breaks my heart that we tell people this. What is a good family? Is it money? Because we had a lot of that for a little while, but my home life was anything but good. Is it having parents who are still married? Because hahahaha. I have known so many people who come from very wealthy families and/or whose parents are still together, but twist! No one knows how to love, no one hugs each other, maybe one of them is abusive, everyone’s in therapy, and they all keep their feelings to themselves. So is that family a good family and mine isn’t? I don’t think so at all. Or what about a family who is very poor, but so kind and loving and tight-knit? Is that a good family? Better still, I know so many people who came from stereotypically Good Families but are Bad Partners. We have to erase the idea that if you come from anything less than a Good Family, you are bad. And if you come from a Good Family, you’re good. But we put this bullshit on one another all the time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.