When I was a child I remember being told that children don’t know what real love is, and that I wouldn’t know what real love is until I was older. Now that I’m older I can see why I was told this… but I can also see why this is soooo wrong. If you want to know what real love is watch children. If they’re not yours you’ll need to ask permission first… trust me… learned that lesson. Children know what love is, but adults know how to call the police. What I’ve discovered is that typically adults know rules while children know love. For instance, in my early twenties I remember helping in a daycare and a child I had only met an hour before said to me “I love you.” My response wasn’t the best; I laughed. I lol-ed him. I ha ha-ed him; I emoticon-ed him with an open mouth and tongue out. By the confused face in front of me I knew this was the wrong response, so I quickly recovered by asking, “Why?” And of course, this response wasn’t much better: “I love you,” “Why?” But isn’t this telling? Someone says ‘I love you’ and I say ‘why?’ A child wouldn’t have asked that? An adult will. I should note that this wasn’t an insecurity thing: “How could anyone love me?” I also wasn’t fishing for a list of compliments, “Tell me I’m pretty and smart and stylish and funny…” I’m not that much of a girl… well, at least at that point I wasn’t. It’s been a slow conversion. My question of ‘why’ was a ‘we just met so why would you say you love me?’ But children don’t need a reason to love you. They just do. As adults we complicate it. As an adult in a relationship saying I love you is a monumental moment because if we say it too early we’re a creep, and if we say it too late we’re uncaring and cold. I once said ‘I love you’ to a girl I was dating and her response was “Uh, thank you?” That wasn’t what I had hoped to hear, thank you, and it was in a question, so that was all the worse: “You love me? I guess that’s a good thing.” Granted, she didn’t laugh in my face or ask why I loved her like I did, but that’s still not the response you want to hear. As soon as her first word to respond was “Uh,” I knew I broke the unwritten dating rule for love. I said it too early. In retrospect I don’t think I was even looking for her to say ‘I love you’ back. I really just wanted her to jump at me lips first and tongue wagging in the wind… wait, that makes her sound like a dog with her head out the window, flap, flap, flap. To be honest, I said ‘I love you’ because I wanted it to give her that emotional connection necessary to make her want to make out with me. Classy I know, but I’m not the first guy to try this move. Ladies have you ever wondered why some guys say ‘I love you’ at the beginning of a relationship and not later? Question answered. This leads to the second reason adults don’t really understand love, hormones. That’s a major reason children know what love is because their heads haven’t been filled with the mess of hormones. As we get older we start to say ‘I love you’ when really what we mean is ‘you make me horny.’ No longer do we simply love someone like a child does; we start to think that love means we need to “feel” something.
The truth is adults typically suck at love. We over think it, we get confused by hormones and we demand that the person we “love” earn it somehow whether they do as they’re told or they make us feel important and/or desirable. As adults we tend to think we’re so smart, but love isn’t about being smart. Love is simply a gift we offer. Quite often the smarter we are the harder it is really love. The more we think about love and how it works the less we really get it because we start putting conditions and rules into it. The bottom line is love is beyond rules, feelings and conditions. Love is a gift we offer.
This week may you start to love people the way children do; without rules, judgement or expectations.
Rev Chad David, www.ChadDavid.ca, learn to love dumb people