Imagine laying in bed with your lover/partner/spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend/FWB, and you ask them, “Honey, do you love me?”
And even though you already know this person loves you and you have already heard them tell you countless times, in this moment, you want to hear it; hearing their answer will help you feel more connected and less anxious.
Then imagine they pause for a moment before saying, “Well, honey, if you lost around 30 pounds, I think I’d love you a lot more.”
How would that make you feel? Pretty terrible, right? And why is that?
Because that story reflects a fundamental truth about love: you cannot love someone and try to change them at the same time. You cannot love somebody while trying to control or possess them, either.
No one wants to hear the words, “I would love you more if you just…” because, if somebody says that they love us, we want them to love all of us. Not just our “good” parts, not just when we are in a good mood and healthy and pretty and young, but also during the challenging times in our lives, too. We want to be loved when we are scared, when we are vulnerable, and when we make mistakes.
This is one of the most fundamental truths about love that, once it is integrated into your being, transforms not just your relationships, but your entire life.
What Mature Love Really Means
Last week I wrote about how almost every relationship must be prepared to transition from the idealistic love chemical cocktail that fuels passion at the beginning of a relationship, to a more realistic, mature, close, and committed love.
What I didn’t cover, however, was the down-to-earth, gritty details of what that more mature love looks like.
It is easy to have an idealized version of your partner in your mind at the beginning of the relationship. When most people go on their first dates, they try to impress the other person. Before the date, they dress up, take a shower, do their hair, and maybe put on makeup, before trying out a bunch of different outfits to find the perfect one.
Couples at the beginning of their relationships also tend to be on the younger side, more vibrant, healthier, and even less rigid in their ways. Partners at the beginning of the relationship do not live together, so both have time to prepare and shine themselves up for all the times they do get together. They will cancel dates if they feel sick or if they don’t have the energy to go out.
As relationships shift away from trying to impress each other at the beginning, new couples get more real with each other as the relationship progresses. Partners stop putting their best foot forward all the time (which is impossible in the long run anyways), and instead put both feet in the ring. They present entire selves, good and bad, warts and all.
They introduce each other to their parents, often prefacing the meeting with, “Well, just so you know, these people do not define me.” They say they hate their job or have trouble communicating with their roommate.
And, then, couples move in together, which is when things get really real. That is when you wake up next to each other, your breath stinking and your hair is a mess. Where you don’t just see the person in their best outfits, but in their stained pajama pants, outside of the ambient lighting of the dance floor or a candlelit dinner–in broad daylight. Or, later, the painful fluorescent lighting of the gas station, or at Walmart.
And you continue to love this person, continuing to love them when they aren’t so happy and healthy on a hike with you to the top of a mountain, but when they’re sick and full of phlegm, or bent over the toilet from food poisoning from that Italian restaurant you both love.
As relationships go on, they face crises. One person might lose their job, the other partner could lose a family member. Tears flow. Fears are ignited. Anxieties arise. All sorts of stressors are put on the relationship, and, yet, you still love each other.
I find that young couples are the first to dismiss the idea that they cannot change their partner. Older and more established couples, however, understand. They say, “Ah, yes, loving my partner through their struggles with alcoholism was tough, but we made it.” Or they say, “Yes, when my wife got pregnant, she turned into a totally different person. To be honest, she was a monster, but I loved her anyway.”
When it comes to love, there are good days and bad days. Sometimes, there are good years and bad years. But love–true love–is the kind that remains throughout the good and the bad. Mature love does not mean feeling good all the time. Sometimes mature love is really painful.
The Art of Loving
That is what love continues to be about: loving the other person, no matter what, without wanting anything to be different about them in any way. Because you love this person, not a version of them you have in your mind, a false representation probably formulated when young, and naïve, and in love.
You realize that, whatever supposed imperfections your partner has, they are all part of one package. If you changed their childhood or temper or unwillingness to clean up the dinner table like you asked, they would not be the same person as the one that understands you like no one else has before.
One of my favorite writers is the monk and Christian mystic Thomas Merton, who echoed this sentiment when he wrote:
The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If, in loving them, we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
You cannot love someone for their good parts while judging their bad parts. That means you aren’t really loving them. We are all whole human beings, perfectly imperfect. We have hopes and dreams and aspirations, as well as fears, insecurities, and trauma. This is the nature of life, and the nature of love is to love someone entirely, without trying to change them.
Of course, loving them by letting them be goes so much beyond just our relationship with one person. It has the potential to put us fully onto the path to unconditional love, and, in turn, to our own spiritual awakening.
I’ll write more about that next week, though. For now, tap into the truth: you cannot love someone and try to change them at the same time.
