Why You Can’t Have Real Love Without Humility

My husband loved to bring his phone into the bathroom when he took a shower. A lifelong music fanatic, he enjoyed cranking up some metal under the hottest water with the most possible steam.

This habit irritated me to no end as I was certain that the steam would inevitably render his phone a very expensive and very useless hunk of plastic and metal. A quick Google search of course revealed that shower steam can in fact damage an iPhone. I showed him the article and he agreed to break the bad habit.

A week later his phone went dead and refused to recharge. I was furious. Money had recently been tight, and we were anticipating having to pay a large deductible to have the phone replaced.

I gave my husband a 20-minute lecture on how I was right and he was wrong. I told him that this disaster never would have happened if only he had listened to me. Or anyway that was the gist of it. Imagine that argument, but with a long list of examples and supporting evidence.

A trip to the Verizon store revealed that the issue was not water damage, rather it was a charging port clogged with lint. The man at the counter cleaned out the port and sent us on our way with a working phone. We didn’t have to pay a dime.

My husband graciously declined to point out the obvious: that my lecture had been unnecessary, along with its implication that I was better at taking care of my phone and perhaps just better at managing my life. I was left with a sick feeling that I had put my husband down for no good reason. I had made him feel inferior. I had failed to love him in that moment of anger.

It’s fair to say that a little humility would have spared me that entire situation and the accompanying regret.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines humility as:

“the quality or state of not thinking you are better than other people : the quality or state of being humble”

We live in a culture of competition where we are constantly comparing ourselves to others.

Social media only fuels this mindset with its constant barrage of information tailored to present ourselves in the most polished, wrinkle-free way possible. We are all conditioned to think that we should want to earn more, look better, be more ambitious, and otherwise outshine our peers in every possible way. But since most of what is presented on social media is pure illusion, there’s a danger of mistaking this false image for reality.

We place more and more value on externals like occupation, physical appearance, bank balance…

We may even begin to believe the myth that we present to the outside world. In other words, we forget the essence of our humanness: to be at once deeply loving and deeply flawed.

This is one way that we forget our humility.

People with true humility ground their self-worth not in externals, but in their intrinsic value as human beings. When people value themselves in this way, they can accept themselves without judgment and in turn accept others in the same terms. This is how true humility builds a strong sense of compassion.

You can’t have real love without humility, because without humility you are not seeing your partner for who they really are. When you face a problem with an approach based on externals and not the intrinsic value of your partner, then in that moment you are not showing them real love.

Of course, we can’t all have perfect humility all the time. But the cultivation of this simple quality can open up the possibility of a deeper connection than we might have previously imagined possible.

We tend to lack humility toward love, to patronize it rather than bow before it, to put mundane considerations before the emotional need to hold someone in our arms.

-Marianne Williamson

In chastising my husband for bringing his phone into the shower, I sacrificed real love at the altar of the $800 phone. I approached the problem from a position of superiority and I forgot my own humility. Wouldn’t it have been better to tell him that I know we all make mistakes and we can solve this together? Doing so would have been a recognition of our mutual humanness, our true nature as beings both very loving and very flawed.

Every relationship is a series of opportunities to either act from real love or to fail at doing so. The best we can do is to seize as many of these opportunities as possible, approach each other from a place of humility, and truly let the small stuff slide.

After an $800 phone is really nothing compared to a lifetime of real love.

Please keep the dream alive by supporting me on Patreon. I am thrilled to be able to create gut-wrenching metaphysical fiction under the pseudonym, Nyle Kai.

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Previously Published on medium

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