There's love, then there's this crap

The 13-year-old is being treated for a sexually transmitted disease.* Her parents are angry with her and they blame the school for teaching about sex. The child tells her therapist that she has always felt unloved: She thought her father left because he didn’t love her. When mother remarried, “I felt she now had someone to love her, but I still had no one to love me.” Don’t worry, readers. The cure is simple: Her parents of course love her. They just don't know her particular “love language.”

Clients: Please fire your therapist if he or she speaks of “the five love languages.” And therapists, please find the appropriate curse words to break the hypnosis of your clients who have swallowed this bilge. Then again, that might be dangerous for your practice, as ninety-eight-percent of all help-seekers apparently have read this book, possibly the one self-help book they have read in the past twenty years. Or did it materialize in their neocortex upon awakening one morning?

“I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me. . . .” “That kind of love requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy in an effort to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction. . . .”

Maybe the problem is that people want to work, while I don’t. I don’t want to work to love.

“Love is a choice.” No it isn’t. It is not an “effort,” it is not a decision to expend energy. As Alice Miller said in her fatal diatribe against the Fourth Commandment:

“Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent. I cannot force myself to love or honor my parents if my body rebels against such an endeavor for reasons that are well-known to it.”**

(Please feel free to change “parents” to “spouse”.)

Actually, the problem is that adults and teens use the word “love” for a need that the past didn’t fulfill and the present can’t. The need is at its root a childhood, full unconditional one. Whatever the adult finds, it will never be the full, it will never be that quality. Therein lies the real compromise or “choice” and “energy”: We chance upon a plausible person then accept what he or she cannot do, where we are not loved.

Love is not words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service or physical touch. That 13-year-old doesn't need a bicycle, a trip to Disney World or a dutiful hug, and neither do you. Love is a feeling. If you have it to give or receive, you are lucky. If you don't, you will find the five languages foreign to your heart.

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* Scenario and quotes from The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman.

** Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 20.