Loving people correctly is like tending a tiny fire in their heart. We all have these little fires to tend. However, if we tend them incorrectly, they can be smothered by too much fuel or put out by too much wind. Neglected, they can be choked by their own ashes or burn through all their fuel.
We can share our fires with others. By learning to tend our own fire, we can teach others how to tend it, too.
We can even help them with their own. For those of us who have had to restart the fire when it has been put out, we have the ability to share the methods of how we did that with those who are experiencing it for the first time. For those who have lived life primarily without this fire, even if we have as well, we can love them from the place of having that fire built. It may be tempting to put ours out to feel accepted or to dim its light to belong, but that temptation is worth resisting.
Then there are those who want to love us and tend to our fires. If someone wants to tend your fire, there is a risk that they will do it wrong. In order not to hurt their feelings, you might put in extra work to pretend that's not the case. However, each mistake is a potential teaching moment. Few people enjoy being shamed for doing something incorrectly or ineffectively, but many people love to learn to do something properly and even excel at it. Hiding the truth denies them the opportunity to grow as someone who loves you, and it denies you the opportunity to grow in the strength of vulnerability. Hiding the truth robs both parties of opportunities to witness each other's character.
Telling someone you love them in a love language they understand and accept tends the fire. Telling someone you love them in a way that truly resonates fuels that fire. Loving them through your actions, without feeling entitled to the fruits of those actions, allows love to become a prayer. Loving without entitlement to outcomes is a practice of unconditional love. If you can do this, the love you give becomes miraculous. It lives beyond transactional ways of meeting your needs through energy exchanges and exists as an expression of your own divinity. It is a sacred trust in being something and someone that life is happening for, not to. It is the capacity to take action because it feels right to you, not because you are compelling reality to produce a certain result for you.
It's not to say that any one way of loving is better than another or that one is right and the other is wrong. For those who cannot consciously feel safe with intimacy, love is anxiety-inducing and dangerous. It does not feel rewarding to share your light or your fire. And if you do not have the means to easily reignite it, or to tend to it when it is weak, or someone to turn to—people to safely and happily turn to—when you do not know what it needs, then why should you ever leave it in the care of someone who you cannot verify will care for it well? It is selfish of others to demand you do as they do when they have never experienced a similar precariousness.
To those who have lived a life where risks were worth taking because the community was full of people to tend their fire, and resources for feeding and starting it were plentiful—those who could even be a little careless with the fires of others because everyone would clearly be okay unless something catastrophic happened—how could they not be careless? Their privilege was to make mistakes repeatedly, without even having to learn from them. From their perspective, those mistakes are their birthright and not even mistakes at all, perhaps. If anyone has ever told you to “trust the process” you know that means that it’s ok to fail, and to make mistakes. To learn experientially.
When all of these different experiences meet, it is easy to reject that which is not like us due to the difficulty, discomfort, or pain proximity causes. Things that may seem like care to one could be an act of aggression or betrayal to another. Some incessantly tease out of love where others decidedly only have the ability to mock. And how we interpret or misinterpret intentions makes all the difference.
Let’s start with love as seeing the worthiness of a thing to experience beneficence, like a parent to a child. This, consciously or not, is the first love one is capable of succeeding or failing to experience personally. And whether it is experienced or not deeply affects one's capacity to develop healthy, life-affirming relationships with aspects of oneself, community, and environment. It becomes easier to see why one projects the worthiness of beneficence onto that which is like them if they have learned to believe they are worthy of love. It is also easier to see how many things can go awry when that belief in one's own foundational experience of worthiness of beneficence and grace is missing or conditional.