"To love and
win is the best thing; to love and lose the next best." -fortune cookie
I posted the
above quote to my Facebook page after a long day at work, a tough commute home,
and an entertaining dinner. Frankly, loving anything other than the caramel
chicken that had been, until very recently, on my plate wasn’t really on my
mind when I read the fortune. Even so, I
appreciated the wisdom and it didn’t hurt that the cookie tasted pretty good
too!
I didn’t plan on
giving it any more thought until a friend posted this introspective response: “Maybe
someday I will believe the second part, instead of trying to protect myself
from the prospect of losing and forfeit the chance of love (and win), although
I'm not sure what "winning" in love looks like.”
I wanted to
provide an encouraging response as quickly as possible but for all I don’t know
about love, I have learned over time that matters of the heart are not best
solved, or salved, with words alone. If
anything, the overwhelming number of cliched responses I’ve heard in the Church
alone is enough to make someone pretend that everything is hunky-dory just to
spare oneself from them!
Yet, there is part
of my friend’s vulnerable statement that stuck out to me; the part about not
really being sure what winning looks like when it comes to love. I think we’ve all heard the expression that
“It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” In reality, if you have loved and lost, over
and over, it is hard to continue to believe that loving is worth the pain that
begins to seem inevitable. It is
justifiable, then, to withdraw and protect your heart. As the phrase I’ve oft-quoted from C. S.
Lewis’ book, The Four Loves starts:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your
heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”
Why would we make that choice, especially when past attempts
and giving and receiving love have yielded nothing more than a broken
heart? It is a tough sell, but Lewis
makes it clear that there is a greater loss that we risk if we attempt to
protect ourselves fully from the pain that may come with love. In the same passage, Lewis goes on to write:
“If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give
it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and
little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or
coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless,
airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable,
impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
More simply and
less eloquently put, the walls I’ve built to protect myself from rejection,
disappointment and heartbreak are a safe death.
In order to avoid being hurt by love, I need to shut off my heart
entirely. Otherwise I have to risk the
pain that can come with being vulnerable, the prospect of which I am hardly
enthusiastic!
In my earthy
experience, love can seem to be a bit of a twisted game really. Like a higher-stakes version of grade school
sports, there are some who make the key plays and win the game, there are some
who drop the ball and lose, and there are some who never get off the bench. Instead of a guy who yells a lot, our
“coaches” may be friends and family telling us to “get back on the field,” “sit
out a few plays,” or “go back to the locker room.”
But the simplicity
of the sports love-game quickly breaks down.
As Jess Rothenberg writes in The
Catastrophic History of You and Me, “Love is no game. People cut
their ears off over this stuff. People jump off the Eiffel Tower and sell all
their possessions and move to Alaska to live with the grizzly bears, and then
they get eaten and nobody hears them when they scream for help. That’s right.
Falling in love is pretty much the same thing as being eaten alive by a grizzly
bear.”
Love sounds pretty serious (and pretty painful for that matter) but there are some who still try to play it as a game. There are the “relationship experts” who can sell you a foolproof set of steps to get the man or woman of your dreams (or perhaps just the one you want right now), the advertisers who promote this product or that as increasing your sex appeal, and the men and women who play with the emotions of others by giving or getting attention so they can get what they want. The rules vary but when love becomes a game, there are no winners.
And so I return
to the thought that was the genesis of this entire entry: What does it look
like to win in love? With my limited experience, I have to say that I am not
sure I can fully answer the question. In
my life thus far I have loved, but whether due to God’s hand protecting me from making worse mistakes or my own cowardice
keeping me on the sidelines, I have not loved someone deeply enough to experience the deep loss experienced by many. Sure, I have tried to love women
who could not reciprocate and put demands on them which were rooted mostly in my
own selfishness. I’ve enjoyed the
attention of women who loved me and hurt them by not being forthright in a
timely fashion with how I felt (or didn't feel) toward them. Those actions were
certainly profound losses as I hurt the people I cared about. Please do not think; however, that I am in
any way equating them to the pain felt by those who have experienced the loss of
someone they have loved deeply.
But once again, I
am slipping away from the original question.
For me, winning in love comes down to putting the needs of people I love
above mine and reaching them where they are, on their terms. There is a certain amount of recklessness
involved, with which I am profoundly uncomfortable! It is acceptable and appropriate to draw
boundaries as there are those who counterfeit love for their own means, yet you
cannot love without the risk that your heart will break over another-especially one who may
not ever be able to reciprocate. If I am
honest, I only want to love people who can love me back, and what’s more, they
need to love me back how I want to receive it.
Frankly, the least risk I have to take, the better, but that view of love cannot
be further from how Christ loved others.
It follows, then that my “wins” have been when my actions were rooted in
Love that flowed from a source other than myself. It seems to cheapen such profound opportunities
to call them “wins” but for the sake of the original question, I’ll use the
term. For all the things I've got wrong and how imperfectly I have loved, I've had a lot of wins which I am more likely to be thankful for than regret. I've had the opportunity to speak encouragement into the wounded heart of a woman whose
heart I had selfishly ignored in past attempts to put to rest my own feelings of
longing brings a kind of healing that is hard to explain. I've had the chance to teach at least one woman, through example, how she deserved to be treated by the men in her life on whose approval she based far too much of her self-worth. I've slowly gained the ability to be
vulnerable with a woman when my feelings toward her made it easier (and safer) to erect walls to protect myself provided the opportunity to speak the truth in love to a heart that needed to hear it. I've got a second, and even third, opportunity to love someone going through a rough patch where they are at, albeit not in the way I'd originally planned. These were honors I don't feel I deserved but perhaps would not have experienced, had I not first fallen on my face. Most importantly, my halting, imperfect attempts at love still made a positive impact in the people I loved-even when I didn't love them particularly well! If it took the losses I’ve experienced to
have those wins, they were worth it.
I’ve written
quite a bit on a subject one which I have much to learn so in closing I’d like
to share some responses I received when I put the question of what it means to
win in love on Facebook. (I’ve edited
some slightly to make them more anonymous.) Feel free to add your own comments following this post.
* Welp... I don't
know if I like the term "winning" in love. I'm not sure it's a game
or contest. But I think winning is finding someone with whom you share the same
core beliefs and who adds to your life in all areas and you do the same. It
shouldn't be stressful, but it should be worth working on.
* I agree with your
considerations of the semantics involved in your initial postulation, but I
have to jump in with a reply that generally "answers" your question.
I have found myself thinking about how my life might look different without my
wife and kids (Oh, let me count the ways!) how different I would be, and I can
describe many ways that I have grown in patience, and peace, in faith, in hope,
in joy - the list could go on. Winning in love is the only way I can describe
success. No matter what I have worked for, I always return to a personal need
for a home, and love to fill it. And…
love looks like me - it has made me what I am
* It looks like
fulfilling God's will. Trust me; my personal testimony backs it up!
* The way I look at
it is just like you said, as long as were able to show that said woman or in
our cases women, that there really are respectable, loving, kind and genuine
men left in this world, then at least we did our job. And the friendships that
come about as a result can be more fulfilling than a relationship, even if they
only last a season, or a lifetime.
* I'll chime in.
I'm currently dating someone who, hands down, has presented me with the
clearest, most tangible picture of Christ's love for me. For everyone, really.
Even if I wasn't dating him (and therefore his affections weren't aimed at me)
but I had
the opportunity to witness them- I would still be able to experience a small
part of the way Jesus loves us all. My fella is a servant. His good mood never
changes because his circumstances do not define his joy. I have never heard him
complain. Seriously. He looks at everyone-not just me-and freely gives them
friendship or love because, as he often tells me, 'I know Who we all belong
to.' He had an encounter with Jesus and it forever changed his heart. But
beyond that, he is disciplined. He reads the bible every single morning,
without fail. I say that not to grant him Sainthood but to apply context. Love
and reflecting Perfect Love takes discipline. He's not perfect. But he knows
the One in whom he has believed and he doesn't keep it to himself. And if that's
not winning at love, I don't know what is.
* Winning in love,
for me, entails experiencing a love that is ferocious, willing to fight, and at
the same time willing to be vulnerable in its pursuits. Love like that is
brimming with confidence and allows no place for fear to reside. Being unafraid
-- that is essential to winning in love.
