There are things about love that are difficult to learn alone.

You can think about relationships.

You can watch other people have them.

You can become very good at explaining attachment, communication, boundaries and all the different ways people manage to hurt one another.

Then someone matters to you.

The problem changes.

Now there are consequences.

You can misunderstand someone you genuinely don't want to misunderstand. You can say something badly and watch it land. You can become angry, frightened, jealous or embarrassed and discover that knowing why you're reacting doesn't make the reaction disappear.

You also get access to things that aren't available from outside.

Someone can see you having a terrible day and not become frightened by it.

You can make a mistake, apologize and discover that the relationship survives.

You can tell someone something you've been carefully managing alone and watch them remain basically the same person after hearing it.

Sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all.

That's useful information too.

I've had moments when another person's response changed my understanding of what was happening.

I was expecting judgment.

They asked a question.

I was preparing an explanation.

They already understood.

I thought I needed to get myself under control before returning to the conversation.

They were willing to talk while I was still figuring out what I felt.

Experiences like that can revise assumptions we didn't know we were carrying.

Not immediately.

One good relationship doesn't erase everything that came before it. Someone who learned to expect abandonment doesn't stop expecting it because another person stayed once.

They may not even trust the staying at first.

That's part of the problem.

We don't enter relationships as blank people.

We arrive having already learned things.

Some of those lessons came from people who loved us well. Others came from people who loved us badly. Some came from relationships that had nothing to do with love at all.

Then another person encounters the accumulated result.

Over time, something interesting can happen.

An expectation meets a different outcome often enough that the expectation starts to loosen.

You expect anger and get curiosity.

You expect silence and get conversation.

You expect someone to solve the problem and discover that what you wanted was company while you solved it yourself.

You expect someone to stay and learn that sometimes they won't.

That last one belongs here too.

Love doesn't teach us only that people remain.

Sometimes it teaches us that we can survive their leaving.

Sometimes a person who loves us refuses something we desperately want from them.

Sometimes they tell us we're wrong.

Sometimes they see us clearly enough not to participate in something we're doing to ourselves.

Being accepted isn't the same as having everything about us accepted.

That distinction matters because otherwise love becomes another word for reassurance.

I think it can do something more useful than that.

A close relationship gives another person enough access to affect our model of ourselves.

That's dangerous.

It's also part of what makes the relationship capable of teaching us anything.

Someone else notices what happens when we're tired.

They see capacities we regard as ordinary.

They encounter our explanations and occasionally don't believe them.

They remember what we said six months ago.

And we do the same for them.

Neither person becomes an objective observer.

If anything, love makes objectivity harder.

We have preferences about what happens to people we love. We want certain interpretations to be true. We can protect them when we shouldn't, judge them unfairly because we're hurt, or mistake our familiarity with them for complete understanding.

Love doesn't make us accurate.

It gives us another place from which information can arrive.

That information can travel.

Someone who experienced conflict as dangerous may eventually encounter a relationship in which disagreement doesn't threaten the relationship itself.

Years later, they may respond differently when their child disagrees with them.

Not because some perfect lesson was transmitted intact across generations.

They had an experience.

It changed them somewhat.

Their child then had an experience of the changed person.

That child will change it again.

This is probably less poetic than imagining love moving untouched through generations.

I find it more interesting.

Things don't have to be transmitted perfectly to matter.

A grandmother may have learned something after making mistakes with her children. Her daughter may absorb part of that lesson and reject another part. The granddaughter grows up under different circumstances again.

Nobody receives the original person whole.

Something still travels.

So does harm.

Families can pass along ways of avoiding conflict, assigning blame, withholding affection or treating anxiety as danger.

Those patterns aren't destiny either.

Eventually somebody may encounter a different relationship.

A friend.

A spouse.

A teacher.

Their own child.

Something happens that doesn't fit what they learned.

Now there's new information.

What they do with it isn't predetermined.

This is why I'm reluctant to say that love requires us to break open or remain vulnerable.

Sometimes vulnerability is appropriate.

Sometimes protecting yourself is.

Some people have learned through considerable experience that a particular person isn't safe to be vulnerable with.

Love shouldn't require them to ignore that information.

Maybe the useful distinction is smaller.

Can the relationship still teach us something?

Can the other person still surprise us?

Can we discover that one of our assumptions was wrong without experiencing the correction as destruction?

Can they?

If so, the relationship remains capable of changing both participants.

Not necessarily improving them.

People can teach one another terrible things too.

Reality gets a vote there as well.

Over enough time, though, some relationships leave us more capable of meeting the next person.

We become a little less frightened by another person's distress.

A little better at apologizing.

A little more willing to ask instead of assume.

Maybe better at recognizing when staying is useful.

Maybe better at recognizing when it isn't.

Then somebody else encounters that version of us.

They don't receive the people who loved us.

They receive some of what happened because those people did.

Perhaps that's one way love moves through time.

Not as something preserved.

As something changed, carried by people who were changed by it.