There is No Fear in Love
Love is a risk everyone must decide to take or avoid.
I love love. I love the affection, attention, all of it, yet in the same token, love terrifies me. Not love in itself but its aftermath; after death, break-ups, or inexplicable endings to cordial relationships.
I am worried that the people I love will die and the resulting heartbreak will shatter my heart into smithereens. I am worried that if I choose to love strangers, they might be unworthy of the vulnerability I show in love. So I am cautious, guarded, sometimes aloof with the people I love. The love I feel is full of fear and anxiousness, and this is a departure from the proclamation in I John 4:18 that perfect love drives out fear.
Lately, I’ve found myself considering the statement that “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear…” And every time, I am forced to consider what it really means, forced to consider if I lack love since my experiences of earthly love is so full of fear. Besides, what is this perfect love that drives out fear, and given my occasional cowardice, will my love always be imperfect?
How can anyone love perfectly?
I have turned this question over in my mind and still cannot articulate an answer, because perfection implies flawlessness, an excellence that cannot be faulted for falling short — ever. Perfect is ‘always-on’ loving, which is hardly possible in the face of people’s stark flaws. The more I consider people’s flaws and my own impatience at said flaws, the harder it is to extend ‘perfect’ love.
Perhaps then, the bigger question is ‘can any human being love perfectly?’
One of my favorite evening pastime is watching YouTube channels owned by couples — a recent favorite being Sheena Melwani and TRID because of the joy and laughter that characterizes their relationship. Much as I enjoy watching those, however, I have noticed a growing cynicism towards them, as if I expect the other shoe to drop. As such, it’s getting harder for me to conceive romantic relationships as anything other than fragile.
On the other hand, I am cognizant of people’s desire for real, lasting love — more so now than ten years or even a year ago. On social media, in movies, songs, books, the desire for love is evident. Even when people mock the corniness of love, they betray how much they really want it. Yet, I cannot ignore how much more attached people are becoming to their egos, men and women alike.
People on the dating scene are waiting three to five days to reach out to their date because they don’t want to look thirsty. When we have a spat with loved ones, we wait for them to apologize first, oblivious to the deterioration that we expose the relationship to within the period of our silence. New lovers begin to withdraw from each other when they notice things getting serious. Unfortunately, we are choosing to protect our egos than we are willing to fight for our relationships.
On top of that, we don’t check ourselves when we are being deceitful or lacking in self-control. In the wake of all this, love has devolved into something to be wary of. Thus, I reckon that any attempt to answer the question of how to love perfectly will remain insufficient, especially as long as love keeps happening within a flawed, self-serving, and egotistical human context.
50–50 loving
Someone once asked me if I believe that any relationship can be 50–50, i.e., that both partners can invest equal amounts of emotion, time, and whatever else, and I went off on a tangent about…essentially nonsense.
I have thought about that question since then, and I still cannot provide a clear-cut answer. In fact, I would rather turn it on its head and ask why it would measure relational investment in numbers — perhaps that’s a wrong way of looking at relationships.
What I’ll offer instead is the result of my reflection: relationships should be a partnership.
The idea that one person is the head and another the neck is why, I believe, power is centered in marital relationships, e.g., ‘submit’. This too, I believe, is why husbands are at an increased risk of developing fragile egos. When the marital relationship is a partnership, however, there’s better chance of both parties experiencing greater levels of relational satisfaction.
Reflecting on it, I cannot help the thought that the problem of modern love is two-fold: (i) we are trying to split love right down the middle (a classic case of do-me-I-do-you), (ii) we are too scared to look like fools in love, so we honor the fear of looking like fools over the sacrifice of protecting our love.
Consequently, we have developed a collective wariness that makes us measure how much of ourselves we give in love.
We don’t want to appear like we’re more in love with our partners than they are with us. We don’t want to come across as too eager, and when our partners mess up, we’re quick to wield the words ‘breakup’ and ‘divorce’ like a sword, stating in clear terms that we won’t hesitate to leave the minute we can no longer deal with them.
Makes me wonder, why do we fumble love so spectacularly despite our desire for it? Will it be so bad to go all in in love knowing we stand a high risk of losing it?
Is our ability to experience perfect love, a love without fear, contingent upon our ability to love like this, wholly, lavishly, compassionately?
There’s also the terrifying matter of death, not that I think death itself is terrifying. What is, though, is its ability to hollow out a perfectly happy life, emptying it of the deceased’s specific strain of laughter, affection, irritation, and personality.
It robs a father of his daughter, recklessly taking with it his dreams of seeing her grow, of tucking her into bed every night, and walking her down the aisle. It robs a young wife of her husband, ripping away the life they dreamt up together, the children they could have had, the house they could have bought, and so on — read the personal accounts of Sonali Deraniyagala in Wave and Jerry L. Sittser in A Grace Disguised.
Considering its cruel finality, one would expect death to be considerate, but no! And it is amidst this cruelty that we have to love without fear. How exactly?
I am hardly a love-scholar, neither have I perfected the art of loving. All the same, I am learning that real love is fearless. It is brave enough to risk grief, heartbreak, and the most annoying of human flaws. It is brave enough to damn its instinct to self-preserve.
A few weeks back, I came across an essay that was written by Teju Adeyinka, and I found something she said to be a fitting description of the lesson I am learning about love: “[Everyone] must put their stakes behind something. After deciding what to avoid, we must decide what [to confront].”
True love recognizes that death, loss of affection, deception, and disappointment are very real threats, but it is secure enough to exist without being ruled by the fear of those things.
This, after all, might be the meaning of perfect, fearless love…
