Is Love Strong Enough To Overcome Your Barriers?

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“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps, hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” — Maya Angelou

If you’re in a relationship, you either have or you will experience make-or-break moments. Whenever you try to combine the lives of two, independent and intrinsically self-motivated people, there will be tension and trial.

Sometimes you can see these moments coming. Other times, they may sneak up on you like a fast-moving storm across open water. Make-or-break moments can be the result of one giant mistake or they can be fueled by the culmination of months and even years worth of ignored or inadequate emotional investment.

If you get through one make-or-break moment, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get through the next. You don’t get a pass on tension for the rest of your relationship. At all times, you are either contributing to the success of your relationship or to its degradation.

When you put it this way, relationships can sound daunting. But here’s the good news. As Maya Angelou said above, true love recognizes no barriers.

When my wife and I were dating, we hit a point about 2 years in when we mutually had to decide if we were going to move forward or call it quits. At that time, our future careers and interests seemed to lead down diverging roads, and we had to face the reality of what continuing on in our relationship really meant.

Thankfully, we chose each other. We recognized that when you’re truly in love, there are no barriers that you can hold you back from arriving at your destination with hope for the days ahead.

The barriers love overcomes

Just because love is overcoming doesn’t mean that you get a free pass to act however you want. When it comes to a relationship, you still have to pull your weight and you have to be invested. Without that effort, you are just taking and not giving any of yourself to the process. That’s not how love works.

Love is about self-sacrifice. It’s about intentionally putting someone else’s needs and desires above your own in pursuit of a peaceful, healthy, long-term relationship.

Love doesn’t require you to treat yourself as less than. In fact, the more highly you value yourself, the more empowering it is when you are willing to be selfless and lay your own life aside for the good of your partner.

Love is like a wave rolling towards the shore. It is moving forward and nothing can stop it. It washes over everything in its path.

This version of love can overcome all barriers.

Love can overcome differences of opinion. It can hurdle over selfish behaviors and stupid mistakes. It can mend what is cracked and stitch back together seams that are starting to burst.

Love can overcome cultural barriers. It can overcome ignorance and even hate. It can work within the smallest cracks because like light, love will overtake the darkness every time.

Love can overcome pain. It can overcome the wounds of your past and your fears of the future. Love can jump over the “what ifs” and the “could haves” and it can create a new narrative, filled with potential.

Love can overcome distance. It can overcome professional aspirations. It can overcome time zones and travel schedules and absence. Love can spark between LA and NYC.

Love can overcome money. You can have all the cash in the world and still not have love or you could be as broke as college kids but be soaring on heights, in love with your partner. Money can be devious and destructive if not approached with wisdom, but love can leap over those possible dangers.

And ultimately, love can overcome time. There are stories where people meet, and they just instantly know they’ll be together for the rest of their lives. For other people, it takes years and maybe even decades. If it’s love, it often has a way of working itself out.

For my wife and I, we actively work to choose love. We both have barriers in our lives, personal and professional that can make love difficult. We moved to a new city, away from our families for my job and my wife, because she loved me, she overcame that barrier.

I have a lot of idiosyncrasies or quirks that are annoying, and she does things on occasion that trigger my emotions, but together we’ve learned to lean on love and let the power of that love overcome the barriers that might try to drive us apart.

The destination is hope

The brilliance of the quote by Maya Angelou at the top of this article is not that it points out the full force of the power of love. It’s rather how the quote ends — by pointing out that the destination of a great love is a fulfilled hope.

When you start looking more closely at love and examining it from other angles, it's easy to get sucked into the vortex that says that love must lead to perfection. That any mistake or error is a sign of bad love.

This could not be further from the truth.

Love is never about perfection. It’s about grace. It’s about hope rising higher than despair and that hope leading to a life of promise and potential.

Love doesn't keep score. It doesn't count down to explosion, it counts up. It counts the deep, belly-shaking laughs and the memories that bring a wide, hard-to-erase smile to your face and eyes.

That is why love can overcome all barriers. When love leads to hope, anything is possible.

This hope is why my wife and I have now been married for five years. It’s why I look with eager longing at the days ahead, at what I hope will be decades of rich experiences and great stories. It’s why I know that no matter what lies ahead, love will jump, hurdle, leap fences, and penetrate walls as we press on towards a life fulfilled together.