Heart that truly loves is a servant for another’s happiness and peace

By David McElroy · September 25, 2020

She says she still loves him. Still wants him. Still treasures him above all others.

But she also spent half of our time at dinner tonight telling me the ways she wants to hurt him. She knows things about his business affairs that could hurt him if she revealed her secrets. There’s something he did recently that would embarrass him if his friends knew. She knows his secrets — and she’s trying to decide which of these terrible traps to spring.

She says she loves him. She says he means more to her than anything. But he has rejected her now — nicely, gently, but still a rejection — and this man who means everything to her must pay. She intends to hurt him.

I had dinner with this friend tonight. She had been engaged for six months until her love told her a month ago that he thought they were making a mistake. He was decent and kind, but he broke the engagement. He ended their relationship.

For weeks, I had offered no advice. I had just listened. But tonight, she asked me for advice.

I understand the way my friend feels. I know how much it hurts to lose the love you want. The love you need. The love you can’t go on without. I know the searing pain of that loss. The emptiness and despair.

For weeks, I have expressed my empathy about her feelings of loss, because I do know all of that. I’ve felt it more deeply than I want to admit. Loss of love has been responsible for the worst days of my life, especially in recent years.

But what my grieving friend is feeling right now isn’t love. I asked her — as gently as I knew how — whether she really loves this man or if she’s simply angry and hurt that she can’t have what she wants.

My friend has quickly gone out and started looking for a “replacement” for the man she loves. Her attitude is one I’ve heard before. I’ve even heard the joke she used about it tonight.

“The best way to get over one man is to get under another one, right?” she said at one point with a smile.

After she finally asked me what I thought — about what had happened and about what she should do about it — I had only two things to share with her.

First, I told her that if she genuinely loves this man, she wan’t going to find a substitute. If her heart really loves him — instead of just the idea of having a romantic companion — nobody else was going to be just as good.

I outlined a hypothetical scenario. I asked her to imagine that she discovered that this man who just broke up with her had an identical twin brother, maybe one he had known nothing about. I told her to imagine he looks and talks and acts and thinks just like her ex-fiancé. I asked if she would accept him as her new boyfriend, someone with whom to pursue love.

She laughed at my scenario, but said that would be perfect. As long as they were just alike — or even mostly alike — it wouldn’t make any difference to her.

I told her that isn’t love, because if you love someone, it’s not just the person’s look or achievements or personality or any outward attributes that matter. If you love someone, it’s because you love something specific about the heart of that one person. You might appreciate all the other things about the person, but if you really love someone, you love a heart that you see and feel and experience apart from all of those things.

She was dubious.

Second, I reminded her of something from my own life — a story she already knew. There’s someone who I love — above all others — but that person shocked and hurt me by not choosing me. I asked her to reverse our positions. I asked her whether she could imagine me wanting to hurt this woman in return.

She turned pale. It was as though something new struck her. She was silent for a minute.

“You would do anything in the world for her,” she whispered at last. “You don’t really think she’s ever coming back to you, but you want her to be happy more than anything else. Don’t you?”

She had seen where I was going without me having to push her.

If you genuinely love someone, you want that person to be happy — above all else — even if it means you can’t have what you need most. If you’re in such a position, you hope and pray that the love will one day die, that you’ll one day be released from the need to place her happiness above all else. But as long as love is alive, you can’t compromise. You can’t pretend. You can’t lie to yourself. And you can’t want anything but peace and happiness and joy for the one who your heart reveres above all others.

My friend started crying softly as she saw all this. We had finished eating long before, so we quietly left and went to sit in the car.

She cried and had trouble talking for awhile. She told me what a terrible person she’s been for plotting to hurt her ex. I reminded her that she’s just human. And she’s been hurt. I told her I understood why she felt that way.

But I reminded her that she has to decide what love means to her.

“Love is really easy when the person you love is giving you all you want,” I told her. “Anybody can do that. There’s no sacrifice. That sort of love has no meaning, because you’re just taking what you need. It’s easy. But sacrificial love means you’re willing to do the right thing and to put someone’s happiness first — even when it’s not convenient. If you love him, you will honor that love and grieve him — while you wish the best for him — until you can finally fall out of love with him, if that ever happens.”

Being hurt by someone you love is the most pain you can experience in this life, but how we react to that hurt tells us whether we know what real love is — or if we’re just immature children who know how to take but don’t know how to love.

Maybe my friend really did love this man. Maybe she’s just been so hurt that she had lost sight of that. I’m not certain yet.

All I know for sure is that if your heart truly loves a person, you will hope and pray every single day that the other person is happy and has peace. And you will also pray — as earnestly as you know how — that God will either bring the person back to you or else release you from this love which holds you as its eternal servant.

Real love means your world no longer revolves around you.

Share on Social Networks

Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

Related Posts