Love! We use the word to express just about anything we like or appreciate: I love pizza! I love her cooking. I Love your dress. I love that color. I love my car. “Thank you for doing this for me; I love you!” So what does it really mean to say, “I love you”?
Many love songs have a line that goes something like this: “I love you so much that I can’t live without you; you’re my all; you’re my everything, I’m nothing without you.” What does that mean really: I need you so much that my life is worthless without you? Is that it? If it is, that’s not real love; its unhealthy neediness and a kind of sick co-dependency. As M. Scott Peck says, “Again and again we [psychotherapists] tell our couples that ‘a good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people.’”
The desire for someone is often mistaken as love when all it really is, is lust, infatuation, and want of self-gratification. The end goal respecting one’s desire for someone is self-satisfaction. The end goal respecting one’s love for someone is to enhance the wellbeing of that other person—his or her personal growth, spiritual development and/or wellness and wholeness. There is a difference, a big difference between the two end-goals.
Those “I want you; I need you, I can’t live without you; I have to have you” love songs are songs expressing one’s own (unhealthy) neediness. They are not songs that truly express or uplift the value or praise the worthiness of the person that is supposedly the object of one’s loving-passion.
Truth statement: Only mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy persons are able to give real love to another person. (Note: This means that most, if not all of us fail to love others appropriately, since most, if not all of us are less than perfect when it comes to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health or state of being.) For, loving someone else is not about meeting one’s own selfish personal neediness. Rather, loving another is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing the other’s spiritual growth.” (See M. Scott Peck’s section on love in his book, The Road Less Travelled.)
Peck examples a guy sitting in a bar half-drunk who, with teary eyes, professes great love for his family. Yet his very absence at home where he is really wanted and needed belies his professed love for wife and kids. In short, he has no love for wife and children in terms of actual behavior and deed. His actions speak louder than his words. This man’s professed love for family is mere sentiment, feelings expanded by an imagined ideal of love; and THAT is NOT real LOVE. It is a façade of love, a false love that is unreal for lack of action. Love is an act of the will, a willful choice expressed in deeds, not a mere sentiment or feeling: “Love is as love does.” Which is to say: “Love is NOT, if love DOES not.”
Young adults are marrying later and later in life. They seem to be afraid to marry. So, they test the waters by first living together, possibly for years, before they “tie the knot.” Indeed, over half all marriages in our society end in divorce. What’s up with that?
My guess is that a large part of this dynamic has to do with not having a proper understanding of love, not knowing what love really is. Secondly, it is also a lack of understanding as to what it means to become a mature adult—what it means to become mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. Many of the major religions have a lot to say about both, including Christianity.
We have grown shallow in our comprehension of love. And we are deaf to the lessons of love as taught by ancient sages. We think we know what love is about, based on our own hormones. And we speak wittily about love by repeating what we’ve picked-up from TV sit-coms and what we’ve seen in movies. Meanwhile we ignore the great wealth of wisdom handed down to us about love and maturity from ages past.
Consider the Apostle Paul’s description of love in the New Testament, found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
Based on this definition of love, are you truly a loving person to spouse, children, and greater family? Or, like me, do you have some maturing to do?
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