Do We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve?

Recently a couple people complained to me about the way their spouses treat them. I had nothing to say to make it better. But it caused me to think about all those cases I know of where good people are matched with flawed partners. How does that happen? Why do good people often exercise poor judgment in selecting a mate?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower offers one answer. A character asks,"Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?" Another replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

This answer strikes many as insightful, but I have a couple problems with it. For one thing, it places "love" in the category of "things we deserve", and I deny that it is healthy to regard love this way. Love is a thing given, a delight freely offered, not a thing deserved or a merit duly compensated. If I do well on a test, I deserve an "A", and if I cheat, I deserve an "F". But love is not parceled out according to the same categories of fairness and desert. If you think you deserve someone's love, or that someone else deserves your love, I'm afraid you are stepping away from the very meaning of the word "love". Love is not a merit-based commodity. Justice may rightly be spoken of as a thing deserved, but not love.

The other objection I have is softer. I cannot help but think that the slogan, "We accept the love we think we deserve" has an edge to it. It seems to accuse the person in a bad relationship of having a bad self image. "It's at least partly your fault you've got a bad partner - you accepted his paltry love because you didn't think you were worthy of better!" Well, I don't know about that. If you have a bad spouse, I won't add to your woes by blaming you for having such a poor self image that you settled for crap. Instead, I want to praise you for a virtue that you might not have known you had. I certainly don't want to tempt you to pride. But I do want to make you aware of a phenomenon that may give some comfort and understanding. For that, I need to tell you a story.

When I was in seminary I had to take lengthy psychological tests to prove I was sane. We all did. Trinity Seminary wisely did what it could to keep psychopaths out of the pulpit. So I filled in the ovals and completed the sentences and asked myself, "What kind of stupid question is that?", and resisted the temptation to give fiendishly sarcastic answers which I would have found very funny but which probably would have landed me in the category of "Needs Counseling".

Amazingly, I passed. I avoided - however narrowly - the label "Totally Bonkers" and qualified for an MDiv without any mandated counseling or medication. Go figure.

But like everybody I had to get my test results interpreted. You would meet with a counselor who would tell you what your tendencies were and where you were susceptible. One thing that came out in my evaluation was that I probably trusted people too much. "Naive" is the pejorative term for it; "clueless" is another. I don't see bad motives. I don't see warning signs that other people see.

The counselor put a positive spin on this defect, for which I was grateful. "Actually this tendency speaks well of you," he said. "The reason you are not suspicious of other people is because you expect them to be like you. You are honest, so you assume people are telling you the truth. You don't have ulterior motives, so you don't suspect others of being devious and manipulative." He gently warned me that there was a possibility that I would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous people, savaged and blindsided by those who lack integrity. I was likely to impute good motives to bad people, and pay the consequences of misplaced trust.

Boy was he a prophet. It's embarrassing now, in retrospect, to see how many times I have been fooled. I am like St. Peter, who despite being warned by Jesus, "Three times you will deny me," went ahead and did it anyway. Forewarned is not always forearmed. Despite being warned to be more suspicious, I forgot the warning (or did not know how to implement it), and trusted liars.

I think a similar thing happens in situations where a good person winds up with a bad partner. Lacking a particular vice, you assumed the other person lacked it as well. Never in a million years could you ever cheat on a spouse, so you naturally assumed she would be faithful to you too. You're honest, so it never occurred to you that he was lying. You're industrious, so you never thought your sweetheart would leave you with 100% of the housework. You're frugal; you never suspected he would rack up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. You're nice; her cruelty came as a brutal surprise.

Rather than saying, "We accept the love we think we deserve", I prefer to say, "We naturally expect to receive back the love that we give." It is not an unreasonable expectation. We project the internal workings of our minds onto others, and assume that they are like us until a mountain of evidence indicates otherwise. The better and more innocent a person is, the longer it will probably take him to realize that the other person really isn't so nice after all. He will keep giving his partner the benefit of a doubt because he knows that a similar benefit, if given to him, would always turn out to be fully justified.

St. Paul wrote, "To the pure, all things are pure" (Titus 1:15). Pure people, till they are better educated and rendered cynical by disappointment, have the blessed ability to see more purity than what is actually there. If you wound up with a bad spouse, well, maybe your discernment was not all it could have been. But take comfort in this. Your blindness to your partner's faults may actually indicate good things about your character. Where evidence was incomplete or ambiguous, something inside you led you to assume goodness rather than suspect evil. That's usually a good thing. I applaud your naive assumptions. Please, just keep being good, and despite your griefs, resolve to be even better.