Stuart Danker

”It’s just puppy love.”

That’s what my mum said when I was all but 14 years old and going through my first heartbreak. “Don’t worry. You’ll know real love soon enough,” she said.

Then you don’t know love, I thought. I was hurting so bad that it had to be real love. My parents just forgot how it was to be a teen. That’s how I justified it.

But as it’d turn out, she was right. I would finally meet my soulmate and we’d be together for more than a decade. And only now I’m learning what true love is. Danged adults and their wisdom.

1. Lust is a terrible gauge of love

Lust was the only reference I had as a teenager to whether or not I loved somebody. It’s also a terrible foundation to build a relationship on. But you probably already know that. Teenage me didn’t.

Teenage me just wanted the hottest girl I could get. If I had a checklist to base my requirements off on, it’d have two conditions:

• Be a hot girl
• Don’t be an unhot girl.

Of course, fuelled only by testosterone and neediness, that only meant my relationships lasted as long as I could hide my insecurities. And on the rare occasions that I’d find someone who’d treat me well, I’d totally take them for granted.

I never did grow out of this phase until I went through a rough patch of unfortunate relationships (oh, we’ll get to this in a bit). It took me a while, but I’d finally learn how thinking with my other head wasn’t really the best way to go about finding a partner.

2. You’ve got to commit

Like I said, I was an ass for most of my dating life. If I’m being honest, I always went into relationships ready to date someone better if they came along.

Plus, if you spend enough time with somebody, you’ll eventually find a flaw that’ll make them much less attractive than the person you started dating.

Maybe they like to leave their dirty socks on the floor. Maybe they have a weird laugh. Or maybe they just have an unhealthy obsession with goat sacrifice rituals.

It’s only after meeting my future wife that I learned what it meant to commit. Don’t ask me how I came to that conclusion. I just woke up one day realising what it meant to be a good partner. And part of that involves being there no matter what.

So maybe I’ll need to pick up after her. That’s a small issue. Maybe I’ll need to ignore the weird laughs. No problem. Or maybe they’ve drawn a pentagram on the floor again. Nothing a little bleach won’t fix.

When I was younger, breaking up was always the first choice whenever I’d reach a friction point with my partner. Now I’ve learned to either be an adult and talk about our problems, or deal with them.

Because if I can’t even handle trivial things like stray clothes, how can I weather the real relationship problems?

3. You also need the right partner

I’ve stayed in so many relationships purely out of lust. Needless to say, these were not exactly prime candidates to commit to.

I had one particularly weird relationship where my partner would regularly invite her ex over to our house. Let me tell you that it’s no fun seeing them together when all you want to do is go home and watch TV.

And right now, you could either be thinking that my ex was a shitty partner, or that I just wasn’t open-minded enough. Either way, you’d be right.

Because what’s important to remember is that we’re all different. And we all deserve to be loved the way we want to.

Me? I’m a simple man. I just don’t want any surprises after a long day of work. More particularly, I don’t want to entertain my partner’s exes in our own home.

It’s hard to know what you want in love when you don’t have enough good ones to gauge your relationships off of. Thankfully, I’d also have some pretty cool exes who’d teach me what it means to be in a healthy partnership.

4. You can’t control your feelings

I’m glad I dabbled with meditation, because it’s through this practice that I realised how little control we have over our thoughts.

Don’t believe me? Try sitting down and doing nothing. Notice your thoughts. See how many of them actually belong to you, and how many seem to come from another being entirely. Put a loudspeaker in my brain and you’ll probably think I’m the spawn of Satan himself.

That’s how feelings work too. I can’t help feeling a slight pang for a colleague who has a great posture and knows what she wants in life. And I’ll be honest by saying that I think about sexy time more often than I should.

But these feelings come and go. I don’t need to act upon them. More importantly, they don’t define me.

It also works the other way around. Just because I find myself annoyed by blood rituals doesn’t mean I’m going to hate my partner forever. It’s just a trough in the day’s emotions. Nothing is ever permanent, because another unrelated thought is going to arrive in a minute, and I’ll forget my annoyance ever existed.

And that’s a pretty important thing to be aware of, in my opinion.

5. You don’t need to win

I used to be a champion arguer. For some reason, I always had to be the winner. Winner of what? I don’t know. Assholery, probably. And a whole lot of resentment.

But I’ve since learned how pointless it is to win in a relationship. Like, my wife would accuse me of not doing the laundry, and the first thing that comes to mind would be: Who’s leaving the clothes on the floor in the first place?

Instead, what I do now is look within. Perhaps I do ignore the laundry. Maybe I could pick up the slack a little. And even if it was a baseless accusation, it wouldn’t hurt to keep my mouth shut. In five minutes, my annoyance will fade, and I’ll be entertaining an entirely irrelevant intrusive thought.

Contrast that with me ‘winning’, then sleeping on the couch for days. Yeah I’ll take the happy relationship, thank you.

I’m still learning

Perhaps my biggest lesson of all is that my mum was probably doing a lot of learning on her own when she commented on my puppy love. After all, love lessons are best learned on your own.

What I can say is this, though: if your partner is the type to play with goat’s blood, then you’ve probably found the one.

What about you? What lessons have you learned about love?

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