Incapable of Love

You live your life, looking out with longing-- desperately trying to find someone to fulfill a void inside yourself. You're lonely, you long for company... but the harder you try just seems to make the reality slip further and further away and you're left alone wondering why.

It's because of how I look, she says.
It's my personality, he claims.
I don't really want to be with anyone right now anyway, they say defensively.
But at the heart of them, they're desperate: willing to take the first offer they get, hoping that someone will eventually love them.
Even though they don't love themselves.
Even though part of them wonders how anyone could ever love them.

And they failed to realize the most important thing:
If you don't love yourself, it is impossible for you to love another. You may experience lust, infatuation, extreme devotion, ... but love has to come from purity. And this vile way of thinking of yourself can never result in something as beautiful as love.

It originates with the start of Love. Love is Triune because it has to be to be love. Love is not focused on self or gain but rather on the well-being of another. Love is a selfless giving and it must be a relationship. However, love is not toxic or limiting. There is no end to the supply of love but rather in the presence of love it flourishes and expands and grows. Love reaches out from a relationship based on giving and creates life. To have love, all three elements must be present: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Love can't start from a place of need. You cannot love if you are desperate for that reciprocation. You are too focused on your own self and your own desires and needs to ever understand what it'd truly be like to love the one you claim your emotions to. It's narcissistic in a creepy masochistic way. It's saying: even I'm not capable of positive feelings towards myself but I'm going to stake my worth on your opinions of me, knowing that it's not possible for them to be positive. That isn't love.

Love is not exclusive. Getting super caught up in the presence of each other that you lose all connection with aquaintances, friends, family, what have you is just... cultish. You are your own person and as great as love is, you do not need them or their love to live. They are not your life line: Jesus is. Making someone your everything is idolatry and leaves you with a very unhealthy dependence upon them as your object of infatuation. Your relationship becomes toxic as it focuses on worshipping each other and yourselves. When something comes in to break that relationship apart or widen its boundaries, it completely shatters the relationship. Whether that be a death in a family, an abortion, distance, loss of work, changing opinions, ... strain comes in. But because you're so isolated from the world, you don't have anything to steady yourself. There is no life support. So, down you go. One final fall. A romanticized pernicious interaction.

I'm so sick of hearing people say things that rely upon fixing themselves before they'll be good enough to receive love. BS on that! We are loved. All of us, totally, truly, and forever. We just have to accept that we're worth it. We're good enough for it. That fixing our faults is great but it's not a factor in determining our worth. So stop acting like it does!

You cannot love until you've been loved. Well, we are loved... we just need to admit it. Not say it, not roll our eyes and move on with life... but to realize at the core of being that we were created by Love, for love. And I'm sorry, but until you realize your worth, until you stop checking out that scale, until you stop feeling sorry for yourself for not reaching your ideal version of yourself... until it stops being about you and starts being about God, you are incapable of love.

And we wonder why the world is in moral decline.