Love as A Career

I have been thinking about how seriously we take our careers and how strangely unserious we can sometimes be about love. We will spend years figuring out what we want to do with our lives. We go to school, get degrees, take courses, build résumés, network, attend interviews, negotiate salaries, and sometimes even relocate for a job. We ask ourselves where we see ourselves in five years, ten years, or twenty years. But when it comes to love, some of us just wing it and hope for the best.

Once in a while when I am up at night, I imagine what life would be like if we treated love the way we treat our careers.

You would probably start by asking yourself what you actually want. Not what your parents want for you. Not what looks good on social media. Not what your friends think you deserve. You would ask yourself what kind of relationship fits the person you are becoming. You would figure out your values, your boundaries, your strengths, your weaknesses, and maybe even your non-negotiables.

Just like a career, love requires work. That does not mean love should feel like a second job. It means we have to understand that something valuable does not automatically become successful simply because we found it. You can get the job you always wanted and still lose it if you stop showing up. You can build a business and destroy it through neglect. You can have talent and still fail if you refuse to learn. Relationships are not very different.

For love, you have to choose patience. You have to learn how to communicate when you are angry. You have to apologize without preparing a defense immediately afterward. You have to know when to compromise and when compromising would mean abandoning yourself. You have to keep dating the person even after the excitement becomes familiar.

The funny thing is that we understand this everywhere else except with matters involving our hearts. Nobody expects a doctor to stop learning after medical school. Nobody expects a business owner to stop adapting because the business had one successful year. Nobody expects an athlete to stop training because they won one game.

Yet most sometimes we expect love to survive on the memory of what it felt like in the beginning. Maybe love deserves a career mindset: not because it should become transactional, but because it deserves intention.

At the end of the day, loving someone is not just about finding the right person. It is also about loving a person in a way that makes them feel loved.

Given that love is a choice, we need to either chose it all the way in, or stay far away from it. Because unlike our careers that are easily redeemable, broken hearts take longer to heal.