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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When Francesca Montanaro’s school shut down in March due to fears about the new new coronavirus, she had nowhere to go. Francesca’s mother is a nurse working long hours in New York City. The grandparents who would otherwise have provided child-care were old enough to be vulnerable to the bug, so they were out. That meant Francesca has spent the last few months with her dad at his pizza shop in the Bronx. In this six-minute piece from Radio Diaries and NPR, we take a look at what it’s been like to be a bright and typical 11-year-old thrust into a completely different world. She puts pizza boxes together and answers phones. She’s even learned to make perfect pizzas. I found the story touching. It reminds me of the degree to which children used to learn more about the real world than they do today. Even though she won’t follow in the pizza-making footsteps of her father, I’ll bet this will be one of the defining experiences of her childhood, one that she will treasure for years to come.

I noticed three instances over the weekend of people talking about Donald Trump’s “campaign of hate.” I wanted to correct them — because they misunderstand this narcissist — but I knew they wouldn’t get my point. It’s not that I’m defending him, because what he does is worse than hate. You simply have to understand the way narcissists think to understand him. Trump doesn’t hate. It’s worse than hate. He’s indifferent and angry with anyone who doesn’t obey him and worship him, those who don’t give him what’s called “narcissistic supply.” People believe that Trump hates blacks or Hispanics or foreigners or whatever group which he’s seen as hating. It’s true that he experiences rage at people who will not give him what he wants, but he’s not in touch enough with his real self to feel real hatred, much less to feel real love. He’s like a vampire who sucks all the available praise and adoration from any group of people — any way he can get it. He doesn’t love rural, blue-collar white folks, but their adoration gives him what he craves. He’s not emotionally mature enough even to hate. For a narcissist, people are simply objects to manipulate, depending on what he can get from them. Trump’s indifference is far worse than hatred. This isn’t ideological or political. It’s pathological. He’s not mature enough to hate.

The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

Lucy just made possible friends with two little girls, but the girls are more enthusiastic so far than she is. Joy, 5, and Hope, 6, just moved in with their grandmother on my street. I didn’t know this, but while Lucy and I were walking, I heard a tiny voice from the darkness cry out, “Hi, doggie!” It took me a minute to figure out where the voice was coming from, but once I did, their grandmother, Rose, came out onto the porch and gave the girls permission to pet Lucy, which delighted the girls. Joy said she wasn’t allowed off her porch since she had socks and no shoes. Lucy was shy, but allowed them to pet her a bit, while the girls marveled about how soft she is. I hope Lucy will let them be her friends. It’s a joy to see how far Lucy has come since she came to live with me. She’s nothing like the “special needs dog” who I was told would never get close to anybody.

I’ve never taken YouTube very seriously as a publishing platform — not enough to do anything more than post the occasional random video — but I’ve started laying a foundation for doing more with it in the future. I created and uploaded some simple branding to my longstanding YouTube channel this weekend and I’ll be doing more in the future. The channel has only about 300 subscribers, so if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it if you’d subscribe. As with all things on social media, subscriber counts and views help me to get future content seen more easily by others. Click here to visit the channel.

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