“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”, Nature Boy.
Love, it comes up in all sorts of places. Songs express love lost, love found, unrequited love, love that one cannot reciprocate, the love of a parent, tainted love, the good the bad and the ugly of the heart.
I almost wrote the good the bad and the ugly of relationship, but we can love where there is no relationship at all. The day the news broadcast that Princess Diana died, I was shocked at my depth of feeling for someone I had never met. My heart had connected with what I had seen of her from the other side of the world, and I was impacted by her loss.
One thing that we all have in common is that we all have a heart – yes, even that ‘heartless’ person that just popped into your head.
All of us long for our heart’s desire. The difference between us is what we set our hearts on.
We are unique. We each long for different things. An experience in life does not determine how our heart responds, but there are certainly tendencies within a common story. Someone who didn’t receive their parent’s love or approval often sets their heart on finding that love or approval from another. Someone who grew up in a helpless situation often sets their heart on control. Someone who grew up in a severely strict environment often sets their heart on self-determination.
Now overlay those desires with relationship and family. We think that because we connect with someone, we see the world from a similar perspective. More often than not, we attract someone who, in at least one area, is the opposite to us. At first, we’re in the ‘blind love’ stage where we overlook our differences. Eventually, we face our differences, head on or indirectly.
*Cue the music*
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return…”
In our twenties, we met a guy in his forties. He said to us, “I know a lot of answers for younger people, but they don’t ask me the right questions.”
My immediate thought was, “What questions aren’t we asking?”
Now I’m in my forties myself, I see definite life stages. I can loosely attribute certain processes through each decade.
Years ago, I was walking alongside a young lady who had experienced trauma within her family. I spoke with a counsellor to see if they might connect and the counsellor’s response was to ask her age. When I answered, she doubted that this young lady would be ready to process the event. Her comment is that women are often another ten years older before they can face dealing with that sort of trauma. This fact made me so proud of this young lady as she worked through her stuff and stepped into freedom. She has contacted me over the years to tell me about significant steps in her journey, and I marvel that she was willing to face her stuff so early.
Just because you are a certain age does not mean you can’t deal with your stuff. You can face it at any age.
One area I see people stumble in relationship, is when they try to change another person.
Over time we do tend to become more like the people that we spend our time with but setting out to change someone from the outset is likely to cause heartache. We get frustrated that they’re not cooperating with our efforts and they sense that they’re not enough for us – because we don’t accept them as they are.
On top of that, they might already carry insecurity, and we are pouring fuel on their self-doubt. Someone who is growing in self-doubt is not going to be the best version of themselves.
Now add that their heart’s desire is to be valued, and you have a challenging situation.
To accept who a person is, does not mean that you let them walk all over you. It does not mean that you don’t hold your boundaries in place. It does not mean that they can’t grow and change. What it means is that you show them value and respect as they are. There can be consequences when they make bad choices, but that doesn’t mean that you withhold love.
We are responsible for ourselves. If we’ve got stuff to work on, it’s us that must face it. We can only change ourselves. Trying to change someone else sits outside of our ability, therefore it is futile.
Learning ‘just to love’ someone as they are, takes maturity and wisdom. It takes discerning when to speak and when to stay silent. It takes learning to keep your heart soft toward them despite their behaviour. It takes holding on to hope – refusing to give up on them. It takes a daily decision. It takes commitment.
The other half of the lyric is to “be loved in return”. Here it is good to recognise our own heart’s desire.
If our desire is to find approval, we will be disappointed. No one person can fulfill our needs. If we demand approval, eventually we will face disappointment or create an environment of fear where others give superficial praise, but their hearts do not endorse their words. My experience suggests turning to our creator for approval, the only one who can fully love us unconditionally. When we find our identity in him, we can face disappointment from others with grace.
If our desire is for control, we need self-reflection and healing to accept healthy love.
What happens when we don’t work on our own stuff? We seek to control this person. When we control the relationship, we find that it backfires. We want them to love us out of free will, yet we have removed free will from the equation. There is a power imbalance. Our expectation of freely receiving love doesn’t meet our need for control, and control doesn’t satisfy because the other person is no longer themselves – they are no longer the person that we were originally attracted to. We create our own lose/lose situation.
If our desire is for self-determination, it is sacrificial to consider the needs of others. If they put up healthy boundaries, we might need to work on our stuff to be able to see their boundaries as loving. We need to work on our stuff to walk alongside someone with a common direction or purpose.
Of course, there is the ability to appreciate differences like the way that each of us express and receive love. Learning about another person helps us to identify when they are expressing love, even if it is not the way that we prefer to receive it. Sometimes they will be able to express love in a way that we receive joyfully, but there will be times, like someone learning to speak a new language, that trying to express themselves in a foreign language is simply too tiring for their current load, and they may revert back to their native tongue.
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”.
‘Just’ to love and be loved. The lesson is so simple, yet so complex.
What a great lesson. Great in its enormity, because our hearts are involved in every aspect of life. And great, because if we can master the lesson of giving and receiving love, both our life and the lives of others are enriched.
