How Long Will We Search?

How long will we search for real love? We continuously search for one person to bear witness to our life and love us unconditionally. We all want an ideal companion, we encounter person after person who we judge instantaneously as flawed and incompatible.

He’s too tall; she’s too needy; he’s too arrogant; she’s too quiet. We come up with excuses to get out of any relationship, even marriage, and the excuse always lays blame on the other person.

The truth is, we feel afraid and empty and we expect the other person to fill that void with imitation love which we derive from praise, power, pleasure and safety. Greg Baer, MD, in his book Real Love reveals “Real love is “I care how you feel.” Conditional love is “I like how you make me feel” (p. 8). We must learn to tell the truth about our past and our behaviors and allow people to accept us for who we are so we can put to rest our incessant search, and just love.

Most of us have never experienced Real Love and therefore do not know how to give it or receive it. Instead, as we grow up we learn to pile on imitation love. I grew up in a household very critical and demanding, you did what you were told. In truth my parents desired to feel unconditionally loved, but they had never experienced it. Being controlling and demanding gave them a temporary moment of power that made them feel alive and in control. They could pretend for just a moment that I was willing and acting out of love. However, that feeling is fleeting because I did not give it freely. I gave them what they wanted out of fear.

It is not for us to scoff at our parent’s abilities, as they did the best with what knowledge they had. Nevertheless, we are what we are, due to our past experiences. It is our job to learn from them and move forward. I learned through my experiences with imitation love how to keep myself safe and how to get what I want using the same behaviors that were passed down to me.

It is important for us to begin to tell the truth about those behaviors, which Baer refers to as our Getting and Protecting Behaviors. Those behaviors consist of lying, attacking, acting like a victim, running and clinging. Every time you modify what you want to say based on the possible disapproval of someone, or you say what you think someone wants to hear you are lying.

The most common form of attacking is anger, which is used to get someone to do what you want out of fear.

When you act like a victim you convince people that you have been treated wrongly.

“Withdrawing, avoiding people, leaving relationships, and being shy are all forms of running” (27).

When we give gifts and relentlessly tell someone we love them and need them we are clinging.

When I look at this list myself, I cringe because I think I may have implemented a little bit of each one in my last relationship. All in an attempt to have that person love me and perhaps he was not in a position to know how, want to or simply could not because I was not giving Real Love myself.

Now you know the various Getting and Protecting Behaviors you can start telling the truth about yourself. The truth about me is I use shyness and withdrawing as ways to protect myself. I have done it all my life. I would rather not say anything then risk disapproval or being yelled at. I also, attack with harsh words if I feel I am being attacked and on occasion I will attack to get what I want.

With all that acknowledged I have set out to correct my ways. I know there are people out there in the world who feel loved already and can accept me with all my flaws, able to help me to learn to love unconditionally. The more we tell the truth about ourselves to others who are capable of loving us, the more we will feel loved and are able to give it away. Only when you have removed those masks of praise, anger, shyness, lying and manipulation will someone be able to see you for who you really are and love you.

Real Love is inside of us. We no longer have to search for imitation love in other people. If we all just stopped trying to get and trying to have and just were ourselves we could all feel loved and fulfilled. Those of you who are fortunate to have someone in your life right now, just stop the madness and take a moment to tell the truth and if they are willing, help them tell the truth about themselves. We must learn to care about how our partner feels and not just what we are getting from them.

That exhaustable search will be over the moment we decide to stop pulling every bit of life from our partners because of our own lack of Real Love, and concern ourselves with their happiness. I wonder, how long it will take for us to get out of our own way and just love whom we have been given.