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"Being Loved Anyway"
From time to time, my Uncle Mike likes to pass along the wisdom of one generation to another.
On the subject of enduring love, for example, he and my aunt are models of believability. They like each other. They have a good time together. And they have managed it for roughly 41 years.
When someone asks him the secret, he is more than willing to share the fact that he modelled his own success on his father's. "My father would get up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, 'You're no bargain.'"
Perhaps I'm just tired of people who pick at each other's imperfections like pimples. Perhaps I know too many people trying to work out if their partner is living up to expectations. But I think Uncle Mike is on to something.
If you start your day looking your own flaws in the face, you might work up a very good appetite of gratitude before breakfast. If you know you're the one with more faults in the morning, by evening you could be overflowing with appreciation for someone who actually loves you anyway. From my own, not particularly vast, experience and my uncle's advice it seems that this is the glue of any long-term attachments: Being Loved Anyway.
There are at least two ingredients to the sticky business:
(1)You have to know your own worst, and
(2)You have to find someone who also know it, but doesn't think it's all that awful.
Being Loved Anyway, you see, is not being regarded as perfect but being accepted as imperfect.
I don't suppose that sounds very romantic. Other people may want sonnetc, flowers, and adoration. But frankly, adoration would make me nervous. I'd keep waiting to be discovered.
I have a divorced friend who got involved with a man who was in awe of her. It was outrageously flattering- for about three months. The problem was she could'nt shout at her children in front of him. The problem was, she had to keep washing her hair. She simply could'nt live up to it.
If there is a constant in life, it must be the human fear of being unlovable. Insecurity was invented by the first child who was caught misbehaving and asked his mother, "Do you love me anyway?"
That child lives in all of us. That child is the one making the decision every day between the safety of hiding and the risk of being discovered but Being Loved Anyway.
We are told people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has to be forgiveness and gratefulness. The understanding that, though you're not perfect, you love and you are loved. Anyway.
-Ellen Goodman
(a syndicated columnist, was awarded America's Pulitzer Prize in 1980)
Excerpt from Reader's Digest "Treasury of Wit & Wisdom" Collection