Here’s a tale of friendships and hostels. Many moons ago I had a friend we’ll call Sandra. We were both expats, but Sandra lived in the countryside while I lived in the nation’s capital. She needed a place to crash for a rare weekend off and I offered my spot.
However, the hosting experience didn’t go as smoothly as I would’ve liked it to. First, Sandra complained that my place was too small and it wasn’t in a ‘glamorous’ part of town. I offered to trade my bed for the floor so she’d be more comfortable. Since Sandra was my guest, she expected to be served breakfast and dinner. I served her breakfast. She went to the foreign market and asked me to carry her things on my way back home so she could travel light and explore the city. I did that for her. On her final day after I served her breakfast, I asked her if she could wash dishes for me since I’d made breakfast and dinner on both days. With a straight face, she said that as a guest, she didn’t feel comfortable washing dishes or helping me clean up the kitchen space.
Then she went on with the rest of her day exploring the city.
A few months later, she emailed me that in observance of another long weekend, she was traveling to my area again and needed a place to stay. She offered to pitch in for meal times and said she wouldn’t ask me to carry her items anymore, but at that point, it was too late. I replied with links to reservations to nearby hostels where she’d wanted to stay originally and I wished her the best of luck on her upcoming visit to the city. I never hosted her again.
Is Love Worship?
Ossiana’s wonderful article about her friend Kamal inspired me to write this post. To summarize, Kamal is a genuinely kind, sensitive, caring man with a spine whose exes cheat and break up with him all the time. Ossiana’s lovely observation was that when someone expects to be treated poorly, they freak out and don’t know how to act when they run across a decent, kind, caring person.
I wanted to add my own two cents to that: we expect offers of love, kindness, and affection to be served on perfect platters. The second is that we center worship in our relationships. Goodness clashes with these, which is often why I believe this tends to be a disaster.
The truth about love, collaboration, and partnership is that it’s an imperfect process. Whereas a manipulator might sell someone the solar system then switch off and future fake, a good offer doesn’t come in this package. Goodness is imperfect –and the person who makes the offer will tell someone that upfront.
Greatness is often an illusion cloaked in smoke, mirrors, and fantasy. It’s much easier to sell the dream and lie as opposed to telling someone the truth. It’s risky because, in terms of goodness, the real them shows up.
There’s lots of discourse on the internet about how women should accept men when they’re doing poorly in life because if we stay when they’re down bad we’ll reap the rewards and the benefits once they make it. This ideology doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons:
For starters, there’s a risk that they may never ascend. Whatever their emotional, psychological, and earning capacity when we meet them is where they stay.
The other person can feel like a charity case, or that their partner doesn’t respect them. Real or imagined and the other on either side.
Upon ascension, the Down Bad one may leave and pursue the relationships, people, and opportunities that weren’t available before. This is how you end up with the jokes about the Come Up Woman, or the First Wives Club.
The biggest issue with these types of relationships is the flaw that we see people’s true spirit when they’re down bad. This is false. People’s true colors show up when goodness is offered to them. When someone takes a chance and offers them what hasn’t been offered before, or fulfills their needs, no questions asked. What I’ve noticed is that while most people will claim they want offers, once they obtain a good but imperfect offer they look gift horses in the mouths.
They’ll critique, complain, and explain why they’re uncertain about the offer. Perhaps this works in a dramatic, push-pull type relationship, but those based on uncertainty and tension won’t last for too long — nor will they be healthy and help the parties advance in their lives. Their noncommittal attitude creates the drama needed for such exchanges.
Goodness is beautiful because it offers partnership and corrective experiences. But I’d argue most people who are vocal about wanting good things and good people in their lives might be reluctant to take that next step because it’s not about love. It’s about Worship.
The Abusive Relationship Cycle
Lundy Bancroft’s “Why Did He Do That?” deftly covers the abuse cycle from the point of view of the abuser. A key component is the emotional high of the love bombing stage. The abuser first treats their partner with the utmost respect — buying them flowers, amazing experiences, providing financial, etc. This honeymoon stage becomes a key part of the cycle of abuse because the abuser places their partner on a very high pedestal that they can snatch off to maintain control.
What I think might be missing from Kamal’s relationships is that feeling of worship. Abusers worship their partners at first because they don’t know them, but the minute they become Real People they can’t handle it and fall back on emotional, financial, or physical abuse to maintain the relationship.
This is why it can be easy to conflate love with worship. When most people say, “I want to be loved for me,” or “I want to be loved for who I am,” it’s nebulous. Their actions illuminate their meanings after some time has passed.
What did they mean?
For every person I’ve known who’s opined this desire, what really meant was a relationship that required no accountability, standards, or consequences for their behavior. They meant a relationship completely nonreciprocal, based on convenience or need. The other person could have to interpret their mixed signals, say, and do whatever they want. They give whatever they want, argue and complain, and leave however they feel.
I know this because I’ve experienced this far too many times to count.
“I want to be loved for who I am,” means “I want to be worshiped.”
These connections didn’t get me loved, appreciated, valued, or even liked, but taken advantage of since people are exploitative. I was also pushed to the outskirts of their social circles. Loving people who didn’t get me close friends. I wasn’t the love of their life or the one, but rather someone they contacted when they needed something. Other than that, I didn’t hear from them.
Choices, Choices
So if you’re a good person, what does that mean for you? I’d say you have to learn how to pick your battles. If you’re not the type of person who employs mate-retention tactics such as emotional and physical abuse, then you’ve got to be serious about your bottom line. Unless you have a bunch of resources that you’ll never get back, then I’d recommend thinking hard about the conditions that you’ll place on others to be in your life.
Throughout the years, I’ve thought about it like this: no matter how rich, gorgeous, intelligent, or talented someone is, we’re all on limited resources because time is a limited resource. Worshiping others means regarding them as a God, to devoting your time and energy to them without a guarantee of any reciprocity. God creates miracles, I suppose, but do you really want to invest all your resources into a mortal when there are others around them?
Ossiana writes:
As it turns out, this actually does seem to be an Achilles heel of sorts when it comes to his dating life. Kamal tends to attract women who are, for lack of a better term, toxic and stuck in that toxic mindset.
Since no one asked, I’d offer this advice to the Kamals of the world. Take stock of a few things when you decide who to let into your life.
With Kamal, it sounds like he selects women who need him in some way, and once offered the opportunity to be healthy they reach an impasse. The DV charge made perfect sense because I’m willing to bet his ex’s abuser worshiped her and put her on a pedestal at the beginning phase of the relationship. Kamal likely didn’t. Hence those side comments.
Check out their mindset. Here’s a list of a few things:
- How do they say the word no: can they reject a request with grace and tact, or do they gaslight, demean, belittle, or rage out?
- Do they work towards a healthy life: Are they currently in a place in life where they’re already healthy and satisfied?
- Are they mindful: do they acknowledge when they request things from you that require resources and effort? Are they open to discussing those things with you to come up with a healthy compromise that optimizes both of your time together?
- Can they communicate directly: can they tell you exactly what they need or want without shame, blame, gaslighting, or deflection?
- How do you feel in their presence: do you look forward to the time you spend together? Do you want to see them more often?
Advice to Avoid Worship
Worship request is sneaky and insidious. The irony is that most will trade good but imperfect offers for temporary worship, because that worship offers the opportunity to feel all is good, well, loving, and perfect, no matter how unsustainable it is. Love bombing is the honeymoon phase on crack, and lots of people fall for it in lieu of emotional support and consistency.
Part of the reason why, I assume, is that they think the good person with a good but imperfect offer will always be around. Healthy-minded people who’ve rejected me have flat-out said that they deserved better than someone who didn’t know what they wanted and oscillated between love and not love. Unfortunately, we teach society that worship should be involved in a relationship. Otherwise, what exciting story will we have to tell others? How many shows can we produce about healthy searches for love?
I’d say that Kamal needs to look at the aggregate of his prospective love lives. They don’t need to be perfect, but they need to work towards the lives they want on their own. The opposite of worship is to decenter, and with all this talk about decentering men, we should also discuss how to decenter relationships from our lives entirely.
Finally, I’d say pay attention to the signs that someone dislikes you. People rarely say they don’t like someone. In Ossiana’s article, I’d say that Kamal needed to leave the second his ex started to put him down with sideways comments. At worst, it shows that she dislikes him. At best, it shows she can’t communicate effectively when she’s dissatisfied.
Those little clues Good People need to focus on when building a relationship. Because your time will be the time wasted, you’ve got to place a premium on what you offer others. Not everyone should get access to it. This will also help with weeding out poor fits.
I’ve learned this lesson too many times in life. I made the right choice with Sandra. What I wished I’d done differently was flat-out tell her no. Or when she joked about my small apartment, I should’ve just told her she could book a room somewhere else. Either way, it’s important to enforce boundaries so that we don’t get the “too nice” label.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Shelagh Murphy on Unsplash
