The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

If he was more like me, he would have pushed. The truth, no matter the cost. But all our lives, Oliver has loved me in a way where he’d never hurt me; even if hurting me meant loving me the most, he couldn’t. You might argue that means he doesn’t love me that much, but you’d be wrong.

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time. The way love was delivered to Oliver, full of conditions and hoops to jump through and lies to abide by, being loved and being hurt were two sides of the same coin. How that translated in the way he loved me was this: He would never force me to tell him something; he’d never push me; he’d never challenge me in a serious way; he would never do anything to ostracize me or make me uncomfortable. He loved me a dysfunctional amount, and love and dysfunction are a peculiar pairing that flavor everything with a specific brand of contradiction. See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.

“To death and for free.”

The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have, and it was one that Oliver wasn’t only deprived of, but often quite deliberately denied.

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?