I have heard, on more than one occasion, a certain piece of advice about deciding who to settle down with in life. With what I’m sure are the best intentions, various women have told me, in so many words, “If you marry someone who loves you more than you love them, you’ll always be happy.” They tell me this with a kind of sage, “it sucks but it’s true” reassurance. They know better, they seem to say, and even if my idealistic visions of what long-term commitment really means won’t accept it right now, one day I will come to understand it. I, too, will partner up with someone who needs me emotionally in a way I don’t and never will quite need them.
What makes me sad about this, though, is not so much the implication of “settling” for someone with whom you always have the upper hand in the emotional power structure, but rather a sense of empathy for what it means to be the person who is loved in return slightly (or profoundly) less. To live the constant, quiet humiliation that comes with being dependent on someone in a way that is not reciprocated erodes the self-esteem like little else can. I know this, of course, because I have been the one who loves more.
Whenever loyalty rises to the top, something has to sink to the bottom. Unfortunately, happiness is always at the bottom, overshadowed and forgotten. The idea that we stuck by someone through thick and thin trumps everything and everyone.
Loyalty seems to be most important for people who exist on a continuum that can include anything from being ignored as child to abandonment, abuse, feeling unwanted, or being neglected. It stems from a subconscious belief in the boomerang effect: that doling out the type of love and care that we want will mean that it will be returned. What happens is that the people we choose to bestow our love upon don't share that same belief. They feed on our love and loyalty for breakfast; expect even more for dinner, but without the appreciation or gratitude.
We sometimes learn the hard way not to give our love to someone who feeds on hearts. But some of us never learn and continue to lay our hearts on the table, day after day, year after year. The real question for that facebook quote becomes, what is the void within that enables you to not pay attention to signs? If no one else is there for him, maybe there is a reason.
And the treatment that you will accept from them knows almost no boundaries. Nothing, to you, is wholly inexcusable or something you don’t in some way deserve. Even if being loved by them comes with a thousand asterisks, or is accompanied by put-downs or bouts of complete apathy, it is better than not being loved at all. Slowly you begin to adjust yourself to what you imagine they are looking for, uninterested in pleasing yourself so much as getting that residual pleasure from making them happy, if only for a minute. By the time they leave you — and they almost always will — you will look around and realize just how much of yourself you had given away. Your interests, your style, your loud laugh, your crazy friends: they were all collateral damage in the face of wanting to make them love you as you love them.
So perhaps it does make for a better marriage to be with someone who loves me more than I do them. Maybe it would make my life easier, more secure, more malleable to my whims and desires. But it would also mean that, for an entire lifetime, someone would be living out a pantomime of what they think I want them to be. I want to be just as enamored with someone as they are with me — even if we need each other for different things — because no one should ever doing another person a favor by spending their life with them.
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