When we’re scared of real love, we can panic if someone loves us

By David McElroy · June 28, 2020

There are few things scarier than letting your guard down enough to accept love from another person — especially if you secretly fear you don’t deserve to be loved.

We all want to be loved. Most of us say we want a healthy and happy relationship. So we plant seeds and eagerly watch for love to grow. When the buds of love start growing, our warm hearts believe we’ve found what we’ve been looking for. We feel joy and happiness.

So why do so many of us find ways to block love at that point? Why do we feel panic when it’s time to accept what’s being offered? Why do we find excuses to slam the door in the face of the one who says, “I really love you and I accept you as you are?”

I see this pattern in other people pretty easily. It’s easy for me to smugly point my finger at another’s mistakes — but it’s humbling and horrifying when I realize I’ve made the same arrogant mistake.

It’s been 12 years since I sat across from a woman at a restaurant in Winston-Salem, N.C., one Saturday afternoon and tried really hard to slam the door shut on love. My girlfriend and I sat there for a couple of hours talking. I don’t remember how I started the conversation, but I was basically letting her know what was wrong with her.

We had been dating for something like eight months. The beginning had been blissfully happy, but I soon found reasons to be unhappy. And here’s the thing. I had legitimate concerns about some serious issues with her. I wasn’t being unfair and I wasn’t imagining things. There were problems.

But in the light of what I’ve learned about myself since then, I understand what I was doing. It would have been very healthy to bring up my concerns so we could work them out, but I was using my concerns as a reason to run away.

I understand now that it terrified me to be so deeply loved and adored by this beautiful and brilliant woman. So I was unconsciously trying to run away from her — to avoid accepting her love for the rest of my life. I wasn’t comfortable being loved this strongly, because it wasn’t what I was accustomed to. Since I felt uncomfortable, I needed to run, so I turned to my perfectionism — and I turned that into criticism of her.

It was my best way to run from love — and tell myself it was her fault. I could say she was flawed, not me.

I’ve been thinking about that this week after I read a series of questions related to my Enneagram personalty type: “In your closest relationships, how do you block the flow of love? As a [Type 1], does your perfectionism turn to criticism? What needs to happen for you to let in and express more love today?”

As soon as I read the questions, I felt the sick recollection of this thing I had figured out about myself years ago. This is what I’ve used — multiple times — to block love that made me uncomfortable. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to deal effectively with real issues with a future partner, but without using my concerns to run away.

Other types of people are going to use different excuses for running away.

Another person is going to raise a mask and avoid vulnerability, for instance, knowing it will drive away someone who offers love. We all have our own ways of finding excuses. Another person is going to find fault with the partner — as I did — for completely different issues.

In all cases, though, the underlying unconscious thought process is that we can’t possibly accept the love that this person offers — for some reason, real or imagined — because that allows us to avoid the terrible fear of letting real love into our hearts and lives in an honest way.

By doing this, we never have to be honest with ourselves. We never have to be honest with the other person. We can let the other person believe that he or she is defective or not good enough. And we can walk away from that love without admitting to ourselves that we are throwing away something which we desperately need.

I think I’ve learned this lesson well enough not to repeat it, but I hope the day will come when I believe that I deserve to be loved — by the sort of amazing woman who I fall in love with — and I will no longer feel so uncomfortable that I’ll look for a reason to slam the door in her face.

I never again want to run from the love I need — and I never again want to leave someone standing in the cold who is offering her heart and life to me.

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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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