I know that it is October, but for some reason it has been feeling like the season of love. That feels a little odd considering this is the season of the earth dying back and preparing for hibernation. However, this might be apropos considering the context of love that I am writing about. The love of Valentines Day in the anticipation of spring can be one of Hallmark superficiality. This fall, I am surrounded by people both personally and professionally that are questioning the definition of love; love in romantic relationships and love between family members. In their discoveries there has been a form of shedding. It is the shedding of a fantasy and a discovery of love’s greater truths. Through their journeys they have found less about their love objects, and everything about the beliefs they hold about themselves when choosing to let go of a fantasy.
In my opinion, love is an extremely overused word in our culture. Through its overuse I believe we have come to take it for granted. If you take a look at Webster’s Dictionary the definition you will find is, “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; attraction based on sexual desire; warm attachment.” It is this definition of “strong affection” and “warm attachment” that I feel we base much of our view of love. With this definition I am able to say that I love a lot of things in my life. I love my husband, my dog, my family and my friends. My love does not stop there. I also love my neighborhood, the ocean, and gardening. I love the jeans I just bought, digital cable and potatoes. I “love” them .
Yet when we begin to take the word “love” for granted, I feel we also begin to take one another for granted. Those who are recently searching for the meaning of love are having difficulty integrating the word into relationships where there is mistreatment or neglect. When I used to work in foster care, it was amazing to see children who had been seriously abused by their parents actually longing to go back home. I couldn’t wrap around the idea that a child, who was physically beaten, anguished at the thought of never seeing their parent again. My supervisor at the time shared that the deepest desire that a child ever has is to be loved by his parents and that children are able to suffer astounding sacrifices in hopes of feeling that love. Tragically, these children are giving up their souls in the process. While maybe not on the same level, I feel that that many of us as adults still sacrifice ourselves for the hope of love. I know and have worked with many people over the years that are emotionally neglected or abused in their relationships, but still say that they remain in the relationship because they know that she is loved. This is when I have to ask the question, “What is love?”
If you look on the internet you can become quickly overwhelmed by all of the pondering about love. Couples that see me for counseling many times bring in the definition from 1 Corinthians. It is indeed a good one, but since not all of my clients are Christian I needed to search further. I landed on Scott Peck’s definition from The Road Less Traveled in which he claims that love is not a feeling but an activity and an investment. Succinctly Mr. Peck defines love as, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In any definition you will find, you will be hard pressed to find clauses that justify ignoring, belittling and disempowerment. Love is the act of building one’s self and the soul of another through listening, validating, trusting, empowering and caring. If we put this definition up to many of our relationships whether it be romantic, familial, or with ourselves we are bound to see that some of them fall short of the mark.
I believe that if we are never exposed to love as children then we know nothing about loving others. There are people who have the capability to love, but have no idea what love is or how it works. Some people equate love with abuse and avoid emotional intimacy at all costs. Others of us don’t understand that the slap of verbal cut downs is not healed by a bouquet of flowers or a night of physical intimacy. Beyond those inexperienced about love, there is another group of people that literally are not capable of love. These are people who had such a lack of love beginning right from the crib, they psychically defended themselves by retreating so far into themselves, that they cannot extend themselves to others. These injured people can’t see other’s needs, validate their feelings or take any ownership of their own negative actions taken in this world. All of the people in both of these categories are the one’s who we say are “loving us the best way they know how.” We try to heal these special people by offering our own commitment of love to them. However, their wounds are as deep as childhood and those that can be treated can’t be by people who are so close in relation.
The premise that we may be in a very significant relationship with someone who doesn’t love us because they aren’t capable of it is a pretty tough pill to swallow. Most of us won’t even take that pill out of the bottle. The thought that a mother, father, spouse or partner does not love us is too painful. Hence we prefer the definition of “warm attachment” and continue to let those in our lives erode us on a soul level. We are willing to sacrifice pieces of ourselves for the fantasy that we are loved.
The consequence of holding onto the fantasy of love is that it has profound effects on the beliefs we hold about ourselves. The deepest beliefs we hold today are those that were formed in childhood. A child’s perspective is a self centered one in which he is the cause of everything. If parents divorce, children believe it was their fault since they can’t mentally process differing perspectives and a world outside of their own head. Hence, when a child doesn’t receive love, they internalize the belief that he is unloveable. When a parent is emotionally abusive of the child, they can’t understand that it is the parent who is out of control, but rather that they did something or are something horrible. As we grow older our minds develop the ability to see things more logically. We begin to see parents as separate people who have issues of their own. Yet underneath the logic is the internalized belief of unloveability. We then go out into the world and attract what we feel we deserve. We find relationships that support this belief, since we feel we don’t deserve better. When we carry the belief that we are unloveable we treat ourselves in kind. If we do not deserve love, then we take action to undermine our own happiness in a myriad of ways.
If everyone is capable of love, then it would be logical to believe that there would be some way to attain it from even the most distant person. An example would be that of a child of an emotionally distant parent. If we believe the fantasy that this parent is capable of love, then this child should be able to find some way to earn it. Maybe that child becomes a perfectionist or an extreme people pleaser. This child brings home good grades and later the report that they are successful in business, all to the same indifference. If everyone is capable of loving, we should be able to figure out the combination for unlocking that love. If we can’t, we see ourselves as failures no matter what we achieve in life.
But what if we are able to acknowledge that the broken lock of love is either never going to open or will only open if taken to a locksmith? It is that extremely hard truth that allows us to free ourselves from emotional responsibility and come to a greater truth about ourselves. It allows us to internalize the beliefs that we aren’t failures and that we are loveable and deserving. If we can acknowledge that someone in our life is not capable of love, we can stop spending our spiritual energy fighting for something that will not exist. There are so many of us wasting huge amounts of spiritual energy trying to create love where it does not exist. If we relinquish this fight, we can then turn towards all the love in the world that does exist.
As the leaves begin to turn color and lightly drop from the trees, we might consider shedding the idea of love in its over used and over generalized form. Instead we can hold “love” as the treasure of nurturing our own and other’s spirits. As the winter ensues we might take time to lie low and mourn the loss of a fantasy and the infinite amount of energy some of us have spent trying to find love where it can’t be found. As the spring approaches we can begin to internalize that we are loveable and deserving people. As we keep our eye out for the spring flowers breaking through the earth, we can also begin searching for true love where it can actually thrive… and begin to feel the warm sun on our faces.
Peck, M Scott. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. Simon & Schuster, 2002.