Last week I got sick. Really sick. Sicker than I’ve been in a while. Too sick to get out of bed. It’s a situation I fully dread, because it means someone else has to take over my share of the chores, meals, and kid logistics, and in addition to that, bring me water and Advil. And that person is Lewis, and he does it generously, but I still absolutely hate it.
Nothing stirs up more ambivalence in me than being taken care of. On the one hand, it’s such a gift. It’s an expression of love. It’s one of the great, tangible kindnesses offered to us in life. On the other hand, it’s vulnerable, out of control, and it feels like I’m wracking up some kind of debt. (Lewis doesn’t make me feel this way, I do it all by myself.)
First, I have to earn the right to drop the ball. As soon as I feel bad, I start looking for data to justify going to bed. I’ll try to prove that I’m not just complaining to get out of something, that I’m not wussing out, or flaking on life. I’ll offer a fever or a diagnosis or a bucket of vomit to demonstrate that your care isn’t wasted on someone who should have been tougher. And, then, even if I have the goods— like a 102 fever, projectile vomit, or a positive strep test — if you have to take care of me, I still feel like I owe you something. Not a thank you gift. A debt.
I’m not the only person who feels this way. Lots of us were raised to be tough, independent, and never a burden. And we think that’s what makes us lovable. This post sounds like a lot of introspection, and it is. But think of it like jumping off a cliff. I’m going first, so that if I don’t die, you’ll go too.
Being resistant to acts of love might not make us easier to love after all. Might make us a bit of a handful, may be a little exhausting. So why are we like this?
Reason 1: It’s difficult to receive love when you don’t trust what feels good
The famous love passage in I Corinthians 13 (most often read at weddings) describes a love that is patient, kind, humble, longsuffering, a lot of really appealing things. But the description says nothing about intimacy. It’s a description of agape love, the love we share with the world, and as such is a really beautiful and aspirational description. It describes a way of being with the world that is not ego-driven or oppressive, but is good and beneficial and peacemaking. Spiritual development GOALS.
But many of us raised in the fundamentalist church got the message that this love was all we could expect from any relationship. Love meant putting up with people and not sinning against them. Intimacy was just giving someone access to the worst of you and asking them not to leave you. You’re not looking for someone who makes you feel good. You’re looking for someone who won’t bail when you make each other feel bad. Intimate love was about sacrifice, dying to yourself, and being more blessed to give than to receive. I’m from the same branch of fundamentalism that brought you R.C. Sproul’s worm theology, and John MacArthur’s view of women, and Mark Driscoll’s philosophy of blow jobs. The degree to which your marriage was a success would be the degree to which you could just ignore your own needs and desires and give your male spouse the sex he deserves and your female spouse the privilege of staying home and not getting to, sorry having to, work.
So love, as I learned it, was just endurance. It was also the mortification of sin. Really loving someone, we were taught, was doing whatever you had to do to make them “more like Christ” (which is really code for more submissive to whatever the church’s rules are). So it was loving to cut someone off if they wouldn’t stop being gay, or counsel a grieving mother not to be angry with God over her miscarriages, or to withhold kind words from someone who had clearly made an idol of “man’s praise.” Punishment was love. I never thought that much of the song “Love Hurts” because, yeah, no duh.
I don’t think it’s wrong to say that endurance is a major component of love. It is. It’s also loving to care about someone enough to tell them difficult truths. But the picture painted by a lot of churches is little more than that. And at the same time, the church was telling us not to trust our hearts, that hearts were so hopelessly wicked that we could never trust a feeling like joy, pleasure, or desire to lead us to anything but wanton destruction.
Unfortunately receiving love, real love, feels good. It feels good when someone adores you for all the things you’re most proud of, and greets your scars and quirks with curiosity and compassion. It feels good when you can tell someone doesn’t want to leave your presence. Or when they tell you you’re amazing, and you know they’ve seen enough for that to be an honest assessment. It feels good when someone is excited to do things for you and with you. (And to you, sure, but this is a family blog.) Sometimes that good feeling burns a little, like taking in air after you’ve been underwater too long. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, like stepping into the light. There are painful things we do for love, and difficult things we can do because of love. All that’s true, and still, receiving love, the real thing, feels, ultimately, really, really good.
But when you’re trained that what feels good is probably sin, and what feels bad is probably love, you have a difficult time knowing what you’re supposed to want, and what you’re going to get if you ask. It’s not surprising that independence sounds safer than being known.
Reason 2: It’s difficult to receive love when you don’t know what’s expected of you
If you say something nice to me, I have to say something nice to you. If you do me a favor, I have to do you one. If I collapse onto your shoulder sobbing because I’m at the end of my rope with my kids, my career is stalling, and I’ve realized that I haven’t felt joy in months…then I have to be ready for you to do the same, whenever and however that might be.
On some level, this seems right. There is an element of mutuality in love. If only one of person in a relationship ever shows up for the other in any way, that’s not a loving friendship. However, it’s easy to confuse the mutuality of love with the trading of favors or flattery. For a time in my early 30s, I lost sight of the difference, and it led to a really lonely season in life. Being useful and being loved are so, so, so very different. Being useful isn’t bad. Camaraderie is largely built on usefulness and shared goals, and it’s a really lovely kind of bond. But it’s not, on its own, love. When I realized how few of my relationships transcended a shared goal, I was heartbroken, and for a long time, I assumed that anyone who was nice to me was looking for a teammate or an ally, not a friend.
This bred a certain amount of cynicism, and I started having a hard time recognizing real offers of friendship love, because I was so wary of “what’s in it for you.” I even suspected Lewis — who absolutely loves me — of just trying to keep me happy so he could have a peaceful home life. I’m not proud of these defenses, but they were well earned and hard learned. Talking those protectors down from the castle walls is a real trick these days. It makes it difficult to receive love.
I need the protectors to chill a little, but I also heed their wisdom: It’s important to know what the other person is offering in order to receive it correctly. If they’re offering a little quid pro quo (in the room where it happens), then I want to counteroffer accordingly. If someone is offering help in limited quantities, I don’t expect them to check in later. If an acquaintance is offering a good time, I go to the party and take my tears elsewhere. It took me a long time to spot the difference between those offers and the offer of real love.
It would be great if I could give you three easy signs to sniff out a limited offer as opposed to a love offer. I don’t have that. More than likely we all have to build that instinct the hard way. But, if I were to give it my best effort, I’d say this is the best way to tell if something is offered in love: there’s no correct response. You’re free to say yes or no, and to be happy or sad about it.
Reason 3: It’s difficult to receive love if you don’t believe people like giving it.
This is the trickiest of all my reasons.
No expression or offer of love is ever perfect. Even the most loving offer is usually accompanied by some little bits of selfishness or ego. People cannot read my mind, so they rarely know exactly what to say. Most of all, no single expression of love is ever going to magically heal the wounds. Each offering is like an herb to mix into the salve, but the hand that stirs the pot can only be Divine. I know this.
I know this, and still there is a part of me that believes accepting imperfect love will leave me wounded.
I met this part of myself in my therapist’s office, when I was telling him about my tendency to over-give as a way of proving that the kind of love I want isn’t unrealistic. If I surprise someone with a party, or give a friend the most thoughtful gift, or fly across the country to be at a family member’s event….I’m proving those things are do-able. I’m not asking for them in return, and I really do delight in doing them, but there’s one part of me who goes along with the grand gestures just to demonstrate that the things she wants aren’t unrealistic.
As I outlined my various gestures, my therapist, who knows the full cast of characters on the receiving end, reflected on all the stories and updates and things we’d been working through. “Bekah,” he said gently, “I think you are very loved. It’s there. You just need to accept it for what it is.”
And of course I burst into tears, because I am embarrassed by my own ingratitude. But I’m also afraid. I’m afraid that if I accept the love that’s offered, then that’s it. It doesn’t grow, it doesn’t evolve. The untouched parts of my heart stay remote and isolated. The questions of my own worthiness remain unanswered. I forget that I’m holding the Divine hand making the medicine, and worry that that ingredients alone aren’t enough.
If someone buys me sweater hand knitted by a Scandinavian artisan, in my favorite colors, but it’s the wrong size, there’s a little part that grieves because even though I feel so seen and so known, the little part believes that if she accepts this sweater then she’ll never get a sweater that fits.
This belief is entirely internal, a negotiation between me and God. I think that this scared little part believes that God and everyone who loves her are just trying to shut her up. To satiate her and keep her from litigation. There’s a part of me that believes she has to fight for every good thing. She has to earn it and deserve it, and that to say “yes” to imperfect love is to say “this is all I deserve, and thus all I’ll ever have.” If I cannot earn or deserve the love I want, if I can’t be so amazing that the people around me are inspired to shower me with the affection I want — that’s when I’m tempted to resort to a far more sinister tactic, one engrained in capitalist, colonial cultures. I’m tempted to withhold approval or gratitude. We are trained to believe that it is scarcity that inspires action, and that once a person’s needs are met, they’ll stop putting in effort. The carrot only works if we can’t catch it.
When you don’t believe that people delight in giving you good things, you think you have to elicit good things from them, either by so thoroughly “wowing” them with your performance, or by withholding what they want from you.
The great irony of all of this is that the carrot works better if you get to eat it. Abundance, love, and safety do actually inspire growth. Scarcity doesn’t. Not in nature, not in love. The cycle of love scarcity puts our imperfect offerings in conflict with our unmet needs. The cycle of abundant love allows each love offering to blossom like millions of unique flowers in a sprawling garden, none of them supporting the entire biome on its own, but each making it more wonderous.
The only way to start the cycle of abundance is to be the one who drinks from the bottomless Source. Learning to see love as abundant has led me to yet another new quest in life, one I’m just now beginning. I’m trying to experience the abundance of God’s love. I’ve always known it theologically. But I’m on a little quest to know it, like with my heart and body. More on that next time…