How to stop loving what harms you
This week’s question comes to us from La Tran
How do you stop loving something that consistently harms you?
You don’t. What I mean is that it’s pretty hard to stop loving something. Love tends to run pretty deep, and we don’t really make calculated choices about the things we love. It tends to be a little more visceral than that. We can, however, control our exposure to it.
To give a silly example, I love ice cream. Like, a lot. It’s amazing. And there’s so many different wonderful flavors! But if I eat too much of it I start feeling bad about myself for reasons. The odds that I will stop loving ice cream are pretty close to zero, and the attempt would make me miserable, so instead I’ve decided that I can go to town on a bowl once a week. Usually on Sunday night. I look forward to that bowl all week long, and by the time Sunday night rolls around that ice cream tastes amazing.
But I have a feeling you’re neither asking about ice cream nor things. Because we generally don’t expect things to love us back. (Ice cream does not love me back, and that’s ok. We make it work.)
Harm generally occurs when we love something and it doesn’t love us back, which means we’re talking about people—the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
This next sentence may be a shock to my regular readers, but I genuinely love my parents. I say that while living 3000 miles away from them, not having seen them in seven years, and only giving telephone access to one of them (this includes two siblings). These are the conditions I’ve decided I need for them to not harm me.
I know we’ve talked about crab barrels before, and I apologize for mentioning crabs and ice cream in the same newsletter, but real quick: the reason you don’t have to put a lid on a crab barrel is because the crabs will instinctively pull back any crab that attempts to escape the common misery of the barrel.
My family is a crab barrel, stuck in a loop of their own misery, and I am the crab that beat the odds and escaped. And because I do love them, I spent years attempting to pull them out of the barrel, but any attempt to reach in and pull them out was seen by them as an opportunity to pull me back in. Worst, any reticence on my part to climb back into the barrel was seen as a betrayal.
It is good to help the ones you love. It’s even better to recognize when that help isn’t wanted.
My parents didn’t want help. They wanted shared misery. So, as much as I love them, I needed to admit to myself that they wanted to harm me. Not intentionally of course, and that makes it even sadder. In their eyes they saw their actions as love. That is fucking heart-breaking, and if we’re being honest it’s a weight I carry with me.
The ones who love us least,
Are the ones we’ll die to please.
So what broke the chain? Realizing that every interaction I had with my parents put me in a shit mood, and seeing how that shit mood affected my relationship with people who actually loved me back. Namely my wife and my daughter but also my friends and my chosen community. And they didn’t deserve that. I was risking healthy relationships for relationships that harmed me.
The ones who love us best,
Are the ones we’ll lay to rest.
And visit their graves on holidays at best.
I still love my parents, but it’s not a love that replenishes itself. And human beings need to love and love back. We need to be surrounded by people who make us feel safe. We need to be surrounded by people that love who we are, not who they wish we were. We need to be surrounded by people who come running when we’re in trouble. We need to be surrounded by people who offer half the blanket, offer to hold the ladder, ask if you need something from the kitchen. And we need to also be the people who come running when someone we love is in trouble, we need to offer half the blanket, we need to offer to hold the ladder, we need to ask if someone needs something from the kitchen.
We need each other.
So go ahead and love someone who does you harm, because love is fucking messy. But they aren’t the ones that need you. And the people who need you? Try to love them a little bit more.
Those two quotes above are from a Replacements song, by the way. Bastards of Young, off the album Tim. It came out in September of 1985, right about when I packed up all my stuff and drove out of Philadelphia, escaping the crab barrel, and driving South on I-95 singing along to a song on a shitty tape deck:
We are the sons of no one.
🍺 Here’s The Replacements Bastards of Young, which is also one of the greatest music videos ever made. (Your mileage will vary.)
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