Love for February

Ever since Marj mentioned she was giving this month’s edition of the Carnival Against Child Abuse a love theme, I’ve been struggling with what to say about love. Obviously, with tomorrow being Valentine’s Day, the idea of romantic love is in the air, but that is only really part of love—a small part at that. I’m lucky to have a wonderful wife to share that kind of love with every day, so while the day is a nice chance to show my appreciation for her, I don’t love her more on this particular day than I do every other day of the year. The day really isn’t that big a deal.

On the other hand, love is a big deal. Even if you’re not lucky enough to have a spouse or partner with whom you will grow old, it’s important to have love in your life, wherever it comes from. Not necessarily romantic love, again, that’s only a small part of the love that plays such an important part in our lives. The love of family and friends is equally crucial to survivors, if not more so.

Most crucial of all, of course, is love of yourself. For survivors, this is a huge struggle. We don’t often see ourselves as lovable. We don’t look in the mirror and see movie-star good looks; we don’t judge our character to be upstanding; we know there are always smarter, more talented people around, etc. But I’m here to tell you that’s not love at all.

One of the best definitions I’ve ever heard of real love came many, many years ago in a church teaching. The speaker was talking about the classic Biblical passage about love (Love is patient, Love is kind, Love believes all things, etc.) and, specifically, about how many people tell him they don’t love themselves. He disagreed. He finds that very few people in the world don’t love themselves if you get down to the core of what love is. His response when someone talks about not loving themselves was this: “Did you shower today? Brush your teeth, have some breakfast?” If you did, you love yourself.

At the very core of love is meeting needs. You love yourself by taking care of yourself. The only people in this world who don’t love themselves are the people who don’t meet their own needs. I was one of those people when I was in the midst of major depression, because I didn’t believe I was worth taking care of.

By the same token, the people who truly love you are the people who are there to help you meet your needs. Again, be they a spouse, partner, family member, or friend, they show love by being there to help. Friends and family members who only strive to take from you don’t love you in any deeper sense.

If you take anything away from this rambling, let it be this. Loving yourself isn’t about heaping praise on yourself or repeating phrases. It’s about understanding that you are as worthy of care as anyone else in this world. Any tool that detracts from that core goal is useless, in my book. Taking care of yourself is the most important thing you can do in life and should be the main focus of every day. If you get up, go to work, feed yourself, clothe yourself, etc., then you are loving yourself. It’s not warm and fuzzy, but love is hardly just that.

Secondly, to really love someone is to look out for their needs. To be ready and willing to help them however you can. Again, it’s not about the warm-and-fuzzy stuff. I love my wife. I do that by taking care of myself, taking care of my work so that I have a job to help pay our bills, listening when she needs to talk, laughing when she is silly, crying when she’s in pain, just generally trying to help her be the person she wants to be in any little way that I can. Very few of those things give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. I don’t get a warm, fuzzy feeling every time I pay our rent, help one of her friends with a computer problem, straighten up around the house, or run errands with her on a weekend. I assume she doesn’t either when she comes home and starts dinner or when she spends an evening ironing. Those aren’t highlight-reel moments in our relationship, but they involve just as much love as Valentine’s Day, a wedding day, anniversaries, etc. In fact, I would argue they involve even more love, because in those moments, we do what we need to do to care for ourselves. That’s the core foundation of love. Not the gifts, cards, poems, candlelight, or other romantic tricks of the trade. The everyday work and thought that goes into meeting needs.

This month, as survivors, let’s strive to do three things in this order. See ourselves as deserving to have our needs met, learning to care for ourselves, and striving to love others by giving them what they need.