What Makes You Stay?

Today I was listening to a song by Deana Carter “What Makes You Stay”, co-incidentally a friend then asked for advice about staying. I’m not qualified to give advice, hell most of the time the professionals we go to can only tell us what they feel the best course of action would be but they can never be 100% sure either since they only have your view of events. We all know our own experiences are not always exactly how things are, perception and emotion skews everything in the human mind.

Regardless, I began thinking “What Makes You Stay”, love is both horribly complicated and simple at the same time. Sometimes, we are left with the what-if feeling regardless of what action or choice we make when we come to a crossroads, other times months or even years down the line we know there was no better choice we could have made and we are even grateful for the choice we made.

Often asking the question why do we stay is as unanswerable as why do we love. Listing the attributes about these two feeling whether inter-related or not are just things about the person that reinforces the feelings that we already feel. For a parent to answer the question, why do we love our children is a much easier question to answer because this being is irrevocably a part of us, someone we helped create, mould, simply because there they were completely helpless and in need, because we see aspects of ourselves within them. These are things they learn from us, most are not born into these people, it is a life we are part of in ways we could never really be a part of in our partners.

The love we have for another grown person, that has nothing to do with us, who are entirely nothing like us is a love that grows for many reasons that we cannot explain. We often love people who don’t deserve the depth of feeling we feel for them, we love people who constantly hurt us and who we not only choose to forgive but accept whole-heartedly back into our lives. We also consciously hurt those we love, for whatever reason we have, often knowing what we do isn’t right but in those moments we either do it because we feel justified or because we feel we’ll make sure they never find out. Forgetting that simply by committing the act with the full knowledge of the pain the actions will cause places blame of the injustice squarely on our shoulders, regardless of whether they discover it or not, we are aware.

So the simple answer to why do we stay can then only be love. Love is what keeps us, regardless of our various other reasons, this is the true unexplainable root to every question, “ What Makes You Stay”, it’s not because of who they are, the way they treat you either occasionally or all the time, its not either because of the future person you “know” they will become. It has absolutely nothing to do with who the person really is, but everything to do with you. What you feel. The feeling in every moment whether it is bliss or pain is what truly keeps you rooted where you are. It is even that feeling of longing based in that love when you are not together that keeps you going back even when you know you should not.

When we realise that the answer to “What Makes You Stay”, is love, what then? Love can kill us in ways that is more of a “death” than actual death. When the body dies, it no longer feels but when the love within us slowly destroys fundamental parts of what we actually are,

that is a worse kind of death as we are reminded everyday what we once were. Yet love also makes us soar, opens something within us like nothing else in the known universe can. More songs, poetry and stories have been written about love gained and love lost than anything else. Yet nothing answers the question all of us has asked ourselves “What Makes Us Stay”, because if we were to put every wrong, hurtful thing someone has done to us on a scale on one side and on the other side we had to put love, what would the honest result in our minds be? That love for us would either balance out our scale or tip it in the favour of love. It takes a very strong person to realise that regardless of how much we love someone it does not justify the hurt.

So What Makes You Stay, the simple answer, your heart and what do we do about that? The only honest answer anyone can give...I don’t know. None of us do. The best thing we can do is our best, muddle though it and find out what makes us whole at the end of it all. Not for anyone but for us.