The Love Paradox
We spend a tremendous amount of time wondering about how others see us. We assign value judgments to actions when words lose their cache, and we do this subconsciously because we’re trying to answer the question of all questions — what are we worth?
In this final article, I’m going to look at two bad ideas we have about love and why we’re so committed to them.
Imagine you could choose between the following — you make $200,000 while your entire graduating class makes $220,000, or you make $180,000 while your entire graduating class makes $160,000.
At first it seems obvious that most people would choose to make $20,000 more per year if given a choice, but as Harvard researchers found when polling their own students, this wasn’t at all the case.
Having had to compete for love as young children, many of us come to understand it as a finite resource. Whether it is from our parents or a loved one, we keep evaluating how much they love us by stacking it against how much they love others.
The underlying assumptions here are that every person has a certain amount of love to give, and that the more of that love they give to others, the less of it is available for us. Of course, love is not a tangible thing. Because it is not tangible, we use things that are tangible to measure love and worth.
We may measure love through money. If our parents buy us the most expensive toy on our list, it must mean we’re worth loving. We may measure it through time—if our romantic partner spends time after a long day to help us with our assignment, it must mean we’re worth loving.
When we feel that we are lacking love, our brains go into survival mode. We are being deprived of this valuable and finite resource and this must mean this resource is going to someone else. We felt so happy when our parents bought us that expensive gift. We felt less happy when we found out the gift they bought our sister cost twice as much as the one they bought us.
We felt so happy when they spent two hours helping us with our assignment. This was until we found out they spent five hours helping a friend with her assignment the next day. We start to use time and money to measure the value of love. We compare and evaluate because of our false assumption that love is finite — it isn’t.
We cannot quantify love and we should not try — it is absolutely not quantifiable. It just is. If they took the same expensive gift they bought your sister and gave it to a random stranger, would they then love that stranger twice as much as they love you as well? If it’s not true for the stranger, it’s not true for your sister either.
If we’re so concerned with comparing and competing for what we hopefully now understand to be a infinite supply of love, it must in some part be because we feel receiving love makes our lives better.
But this isn’t really true either.
While it is certainly true that those who love us often enrich our lives, when we’re emotionally healthy, it is not the love we are receiving that is actually having an impact on our emotional and psychological well being.
Think about that guy who has a crush on you. He tells you he loves you every day. Does it enrich your life? If a stranger walks up to you on the street and tells you they love you, does it really make up for the fact that you’re convinced your parents don’t? No. So receiving love is not what makes our lives better.
Unless.
If being adored and loved by others was all that was required to feel content and happy, it would be hard to understand the level of despair and pain celebrities like Robin Williams, Amy Winehouse, and Heath Ledger went through before committing suicide. There’s something else.
It’s not the love we receive, but rather the love we give that enriches our lives. When we treat others well, do things we love to do with love, and genuinely care for the well being of others, we feel great. Loving others calms our brains, and extends our lives.
Feeling that we are loved only quiets the paranoid thoughts in our heads that we are not worth loving. When we’re lonely or feeling bummed and someone loves a post we wrote or tells us they love us, we feel better for a short period of time. We assume that this means we need an endless supply of this reassurance and love in order to sustain our happiness.
What no one mentions is that once you’re no longer in a place where you feel lacking, the benefits of feeling loved are greatly reduced.
If you’re constantly seeking validation that you’re loveable, ask why you feel you’re unlovable and why you believe there’s something wrong with you. Upon resolving these thoughts, you’ll be able to return to a healthier mindset less dependent on the short-term dopamine loop.
The good news is, once you enter this healthier mindset, your focus becomes more outward and you become less focussed on how others see you and more focussed on seeing others. You’ll find that it is far more consistent to have your day-to-day happiness grounded in the love you’re giving than the love you’re receiving.
The Love Paradox
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