Are we supposed to ‘feel’ loved to ‘be’ loved?

In 1970, a film adaptation of Erich Segal’s novel ‘Love Story’ made famous the line ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’, but it took another 34 years and an 8-year-old called Lisa Simpson to point out ‘No it doesn’t! This movie is drivel!’ Little legend Lisa.

Can you think of anything more manipulative than the classic cliché, ‘if you really loved me then you would…’? It’s the catchphrase of the abuser, the passive-aggressive turn of the knife, and the ultimate hammer blow of peer-pressure.

That little line alone has probably caused more regret and relational ruin than the entire collected works of J.D. Salinger and August Strindberg combined!

But have we made the philosophy behind this idea acceptable? Do we also judge (and sometimes flat out reject) the very existence of someone’s genuine love by our own emotive litmus tests.

If a tree falls in the woods

There is a growing trend that says perception is reality. Love, therefore, gets held to ransom by the loved. It’s measured in the eye of the beholder.

Imagine for a second that we decided that something was only food if we liked its taste. I really don’t like taste of celery, but because I don’t like it doesn’t make it not food. I really do like the taste of PlayDoh, but I don’t think that makes the neon pink putty into food, just because I have weird taste buds.

The classic is ‘if a tree falls in the woods, but no one was around to hear it, did it actually make a sound?’ It’s an interesting question, and one that places individualistic humanity over and above the reality of any and all outside experiences. It’s pretty selfish, and rather me-centric, but isn’t that just like us?

When it comes to love, we have begun to say things like ‘if I didn’t feel it right, then you didn’t do it right!’ Or more commonly, ‘unless you approve of me then you can’t really love me.’ When did approval get into this game?

There is a big difference between acceptance and approval. Whereas God might accept me just as I am, he doesn’t necessarily approve of all I am. It’s completely legitimate to have acceptance without approval. I think God probably wants me to eat celery and not PlayDoh! This doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love me though.

My wife accepts me leaving my underwear on the bathroom floor, it doesn’t mean she approves of it. Helping a friend with a drug addiction needs to come with acceptance of the person, but not approval of the habit, otherwise it’s just enabling.

If I said that you can’t love me because you don’t accept me – when what I really mean is approve of me – I think I would be just a tad manipulative. I would be holding your love ransom to my subjective and emotive standard. This just isn’t fair.

What about all the feels?

The resulting subversively emerging assumption (try saying that five times faster) is that making people feel loved is exactly what we were trying to conjure up all along. Of course, it’s entirely possibly to make someone feel loved, but not actually love them at all – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s start with the goodness in this before we entirely chew the idea up and spit it out.

• If you’re making no effort to understand the people that you are apparently loving, then are you really making an effort to love them?
• If you’re holding people enslaved to your ideas of what they should and shouldn’t be before you love them, is it really love?
• If you’re totally indifferent to how someone feels in response to your ‘loving’ language and or actions, then are you really sure that ‘loving’ is what you are doing?

Just saying ‘I’m loving you’ without any accountability to the person we’re loving isn’t enough. They might feel it or not feel it, but frankly we might be getting it wrong anyway.

It’s always worth taking an emotional inventory before we push too hard on the ‘but I’m misunderstood’ button. Feeling loved, after all, is at least part of what we’re hoping for when we love someone. At least it should be.

This issue goes both ways, but is the feeling the whole story? No. It’s not even on the first page.

Are we loving wrong when they don’t ‘feel it’?

If people don’t feel loved by our love, would it necessarily mean that we’re loving those people ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, damaged, or deficient? Would it be unfledged or immature?

Let’s think about this for a moment. Have you ever done a loving thing that was then unfortunately taken in the wrong way? Have you ever been genuinely loving but the one you loved took it as something other than love? If you’re a parent, I imagine you can think of all kinds of examples!

Is it loving, for instance, to make your kids eat their greens, take baths, go to school, do their homework, or turn off their xbox after fifteen straight hours of looking like a zombie? Is it loving to watch out for who they are friends with, what they’re watching on TV, or who talking to on the internet? Is it loving to sometimes tell them ‘no’ or to discipline them when they cross a line?

Are there also times when a person we’re loving just won’t remember our loving actions? Is it, for instance, loving to pick up a drunk person from the floor and get them into a taxi home if they don’t remember that you did it? What about giving money to a charity that works with street children in Guatemala. The kids might ‘feel’ loved by the direct staff workers and volunteers, but they might not feel loved by the anonymous donor.

Thinking now of this in youth ministry, is it loving to tell young people about what the Bible says, even when it flies in the teeth about what they want? Is it loving to caution them about promiscuity, drug use, lying, or disrespecting their parents? Is it loving to talk to them about sin, God’s wrath or Hell?

Of course, it matters how you do all these things, but do we really expect people will always feel loved when we love them – is that realistic of fair?

Put another way, what would happen to our relationships with these people if we kept changing what we did in order to make sure they always felt loved. Would it always be in their best interests?

What is love, really?

Many in our culture believe that love is primarily and essentially a feeling. That is its crux, basis and bottom line. Five decades of Hollywood romance has taught us this.

Love and feelings do often overlap, of course. Love can give us all of the feels! It’s a great descriptive word to use for the warm fuzzies and we often identify the feeling of ‘love’ when good things have happened. We feel love at a funeral and we feel love at a wedding – it’s an important descriptor for complicated emotions.

So, love can be descriptive, but does that make it a feeling in and of itself?

Although love can be a descriptor for a complicated set of powerful emotions, the word itself in English is historically a verb. Love is an action, it’s something that we do. Even in New Testament Greek, the four words ἀγάπη, ἔρως, φιλία, and στοργή can be both nouns and verbs, and often mean both together.

When we love someone then, we don’t simply ‘feel’ towards them with some kind spasmodic force. Feelings may accompany what we do, but they are not the whole. When we love somebody we serve them, we help them, we lift them up, we support them, we stand with them, we are present to them, and we protect them. Occasionally we might even withdraw from them.

Sometimes we lovingly do loving things for people that are best for them even if they won’t like them or recognise them as ‘love’. My wife is still trying to ‘lovingly’ make me see a dentist.

Where do ‘love languages’ feature in this?

This is a really interesting question. Gary Chapman’s ‘love languages’ books became a growing phenomenon in the Church throughout the last two decades, disseminating across Christian literature.

There’s an awful lot of important things to learn about how people give and receive love in these ideas. Understanding love languages as a part of personality types can help us communicate better with people and be more sympathetic. They are not the whole story though and need to be balanced with a much fuller philosophy of who people are and what love is.

I would strongly suggest reading about love languages but keep that in check with reading something like Don Carson’s fabulous little book, ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.’

What about God?

God tells us that he disciplines those he loves. He reminds us of this exactly because often we don’t feel loved when He does (Pr. 3:12; Heb. 12:4-12). Is God’s loving discipline somehow defective? Does God need to readdress his understanding of our love languages? Of course not!

God is love after all (1 Jn. 4:7-12), and we should never accuse Him of not being so just because we didn’t ‘feel’ it at any given time.

We hope that the people we love will always feel loved – of course we do! There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between the two. However, one doesn’t guarantee the other. We can’t hold our own loving actions captive to someone else’s feelings.

If in doubt, we should do the loving thing, however it is taken.