Is it your responsibility to make the people you love ‘feel’ loved?

A couple of days ago, a famous pastor in America quoted this:

You must bear the burden of responsibility that your children BE loved, but you dare not bear the burden of guaranteeing that they FEEL loved. In that case you would replace God’s objective command with their subjective response, and make a human the arbiter of obligation.

— John Piper (@JohnPiper) November 6, 2018

Although Pastor John Piper has become an increasingly divisive figure in the past decade, there were much stronger responses than I expected. These included:

This is the language of an abuser. "I love you! It's not my fault if you don't FEEL loved."

— Julie B 🦄🎩 (@gottabejulie) November 6, 2018

If our children don't feel loved, then we're not loving very well.

— teresaleigh (@teresaleigh1223) November 6, 2018

That might be the most cockamamie thing I’ve ever heard. What a worthless thing to say. Why make an excuse for a parent not trying to make their children feel loved? For some extrapolated, intelligent-sounding, but ultimately irrelevant point of a pretty (dark) sounding theology

— mama mia let me go (@matthaeck) November 6, 2018

What are you on about? If my kid doesn’t feel loved, I have an obligation to love her in the language she perceives as love. #perceptionisreality

— Yasminda Choate (@yasminda_c) November 6, 2018

This is an endorsement of abuse, pure and simple.

— decca (@conunlibro) November 6, 2018

If they do not feel it, how do they know it’s there, since love is an emotion?

— Miriam (@MiriamShulamit) November 6, 2018

news flash loving others well (ESPECIALLY children) MEANS (among other things) making sure they feel loved.

— emily "trying my best” wilkerson (@vigiluncle) November 6, 2018

Wow . John Piper is *not* a good dad.

— Charles Dire (@CharlesDire) November 7, 2018

That is horrible! You should always check in for what makes your children feel loved and supported and what doesn't! This is such an abusive belief!

— Daddy Angel (@champagnzee) November 6, 2018

I was pretty confused by responses, and I hurt by the way they made harsh assumptive judgements on his own parenting and kids. This said, I was still sympathetic with some of their passions. I wonder if a little thought experiment would help?

Is love an emotion?

One of the strongest driving points from these tweets is that love is primarily and essentially a feeling. Five decades of Hollywood romance has taught us this! Although love can be a descriptor for a complicated set of powerful emotions, the word itself is historically a verb.

Love is an action then, it’s something that we do. When we love someone, we don’t simply feel towards them (although that may come with it), but we serve them, we help them, we lift them up, we support them, we stand with them, and we protect them. Sometimes we do things that are best for them that they just won’t like.

Should we be in control of how people ‘feel’?

We do these loving things because we love them, not because we need them to feel loved. Think about the motivation here: Do we do loving things because we love… or do we do loving things to make them feel loved?

If our motivations to do loving things is primarily the latter, then the former is simply not required. You could hate someone’s guts and still do things to make them ‘feel’ loved.

Being motivated by the ability to manipulate their emotional state at best cheapens the experience of love, and at worst is actually abuse. We have to love people and allow them to the room to respond to it out of the freedom of their own experiences and judgements.

One of the key indicators of human maturity is the knowledge that we just cannot control the feelings of those around us, or their interpretations of our actions.

Piper’s tweet uses the words ‘guaranteeing’ that they feel love. Can we ever do this? For anyone? Can you guarantee that the person you love will feel the love they should?

We should love genuinely, passionately, and authentically – motivated by loving someone, not by trying to guarantee their emotions. It’s great when someone feels loved, and of course we hope for that! Devaluing love because you can’t guarantee that it will be felt is just… well, odd, and frankly dangerous.

What about when people just don’t feel loved… even when we are loving?

If people don’t feel loved by our loving actions, would it necessarily mean that we’re loving ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, broken, or immature? Surely not.

Is it loving to pick a drunk person off the floor and get them into a taxi home? Most likely, but it’s pretty unlikely they’ll remember us. Does this mean they were not properly loved because they didn’t feel loved?

What about making your kids eat their greens, take baths, go to school, do their homework, or turn off their xbox? What about watching out for who they are friends with or grounding them for being misbehaved?

God tells us that he disciplines those he loves. He reminds us of this exactly because they didn’t feel loved (Pr. 3:12; Heb 12:4-12). Is God’s loving discipline somehow defective? Does God need to readdress his understanding of people’s love languages?

We hope that people we love will always feel loved – of course we do! There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between the two. However, one doesen’t guarantee the other, and in doubt, do the loving thing and don’t hold your own actions captive to someone’s subjective feelings.