How many girls have written out their list of what makes the "perfect" man? I know that I wrote that list. It's extensive. At least eight pages.
It seemed like a great idea when I was writing it, but now that I think about it, all it did was cause me to have an unmeetable standard. There is no way that any man in the world can ever meet every single criterion that I have on my list. Sure, I had some things that were just preferences, but my "demands" took up about seven and a half of those eight pages.
So when I got into a relationship, what did I do? I looked at my list and realized he didn't meet this thing, he didn't meet that thing, or this or that or this or that, but I had idealized the perfect man so much in my head, that basically, I fell in love with the man's personality and just decided I would change his values to meet my own.
Now, I never ever had any desire to change his personality or change the way he truly was I loved his personality. It's why I started liking him. Just certain little things that would make him match up to my list better than he did on his own.
Was that appropriate? Absolutely not.
I realized that it was inappropriate early on in our relationship, but certain things happened around the same time that caused me not to trust this guy at all... so I sort of shut down my conscience and decided that, "well, I love him and the only way that I can stay with him is if these things change... so I'm gonna have to just make him change them."
So essentially, we ended up putting each other through ten months of hell because we loved each other dearly, but we didn't love enough about each other to be satisfied with exactly how we were. I didn't love that he lied to me and betrayed my trust, he didn't love that I got angry at him for it and couldn't forgive him. But no matter what, those qualities just couldn't change.
I thought that maybe if we made our relationship more God centered, things would be different. Perhaps if "he became more godly, then he wouldn't lie to me so much!" But there's a problem with that logic, my primary focus spiritually should be whether I am living in a godly manner. Which I wasn't. I was so consumed with trying to change his relationship with God that I completely neglected my own. Which essentially destroyed both of our relationships with God because he had it in his head that I was some great Christian, but I wasn't even able to forgive him. How's that for hypocrisy? I know I wouldn't feel encouraged to be more Christlike if the person I thought was most Christlike acted like I did to him. So he didn't strive to change, and when he wasn't changing, I got angry at God and blamed Him for everything that was going wrong. That's a huge red flag that your relationship is going downhill, very very quickly. Just so you know.
But anyway, we began to meet with Ron Kopicko, and he said to me, "I believe that love is the complete absence of expectations." Which didn't sound good to me, because I was so wound up and stressed over all of the times that this certain guy had betrayed my trust that I had turned into a sort of psycho that I never ever ever wanted to be and is completely out of my character to be... but I was so scared of losing him that I couldn't see any other way. My way pushed him even further away from me, of course.
But it's true. If you enter a relationship knowing what you want out of it, and just enjoying the person that you're with and not asking anything of them, you are much more able to see their true character. If you can be around a person and never ask anything of them, and you find that you respect them for their honesty, you respect them for their purity, their thoughtfulness, their kindness, their relationships and all of that, you can truly love that person for who they are. The best part is, you haven't caused them to put on a mask for you to fall in love with, only to find that it wasn't real to begin with.
If I had entered that relationship and just let that person be exactly who they were and show me their true character without me trying to burry it away because I just didn't want to admit that I didn't like it, I wouldn't have gotten so attached to someone so wrong for me. Don't get me wrong, I love his personality. He made me laugh more than any person on the planet, he made me feel beautiful when I looked disgusting, he made me feel special, he found beauty in the strangest things, and he had a heart for people that I've never seen in anyone else. I love all those things. But there were bad things that I would've been able to see much sooner if I had just let him be exactly who he was and never asked anything of him. Things that are deal breakers. Why would I want to be with someone who betrayed my trust all the time and made me feel like I wasn't worth being honest with? Rather than just ending it and guarding my heart, I tried to change him. I put expectations on him that he just couldn't meet. We both got horribly, horribly hurt because of it.
So why don't we, as ladies, get rid of our lists? Why don't we just say, "God. I want a man who loves you and serves you with all his heart and who will love me like Christ loves the church," and truly trust God to bring that man into our lives? We can't change the men that we date. So it's best to see them for who they really are early on in the relationship. Having expectations not only puts stress on them, but it also forces them to put up a front. And who really wants to fall in love with a fake version of someone? And who really wants to be so stressed out about whether someone will leave you or not that you become that absolute worst version of yourself that you never thought you could ever be? I know I don't... I've been there, dated that. I want to fall in love with someone who I can grow spiritually with. Not someone who's entire character I want to change because I don't like the one he's got. That's not fair to either of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment