Getting Ready for Valentine’s Day with the Wicked Truth About Love: Part 6, Custodian

Last updated on: February 13, 2015 at 4:12 am by Suzanne Ross

Getting Ready for Valentine’s Day with the Wicked Truth About Love: Part 6, Custodian 2015-02-12T19:02:50-05:00 Suzanne Ross

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Custodian, illustration by Susan Drawbaugh

I’d like to end my series on the obstacles to love with a few last thoughts about what love is. We’ve been talking about obstacles to love as tangled patterns of desire and then trying to get ourselves untangled by learning that desire itself is triangular (we learn what to desire by imitating the desires of others). We looked at five different patterns of desire to better understand how the triangle of desire operates in our relationships: Best Friend Forever, Celebrity Chef, Super Hero, Rock Starand Sidekick. In this last post of the series, I will focus on the last two chapters of my book which are devoted to freeing ourselves from the tangled rope by realizing that real, honest to goodness love is a gift with no strings attached. In fact, love is not just a gift, it is Gift itself.

Competitive Gift Giving: Not Love!

What does that mean? Well, a gift is something we give one another that somehow or other seems to tie us into an obligation to give something back. Think of whom you exchange birthday presents with. It’s always someone who gives you a gift on your birthday and if someone outside of that circle happens to give you a gift, don’t you feel obligated to find out when their birthday is and return the giving? A gift always involves a reciprocal obligation. What happens when the person you gave a $15 wall plaque to that said, “You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose but you can’t pick your friend’s nose” and on your next birthday they give you a pair of tickets to a concert worth $150? Don’t you feel embarrassed and very much in debt to them? The expensive gift feels a bit like one-upmanship with you on the bottom and your friend gloating over you in his generosity. You can’t wait till his birthday to make things right by giving him a $200 cashmere sweater with his initials embroidered on it. A gift has turned into a game of “can you top this” and it’s all about making sure your gift earns you more prestige points than your friend’s earned him.

Giving With No Strings Attached: Love!

Okay, that is NOT what love is. Love is Gift, not a gift. Gift is giving without any expectation of getting something in return. It is simply the giving itself with no strings attached. When you give that way, you form a different type of relationship with the person you are giving to. With a gift, it’s a competitive relationship disguised as generosity that creates tensions and resentments. To avoid this, friends and family will often put a spending limit on gifts or decide together that the gifts must all be home-made or better yet, dispense with the gift giving and just spend some time together. That at least avoids the risk that someone will get caught up in the game of competitive gift giving. Love is giving non-competitively.

Love Creates Something New: Relationship

When two people engage in this kind of giving, something remarkable happens. They begin to build something, actually create something new that did not exist before. Often we call this thing the “relationship” though it’s different than the competitive type of relationships we usually have. The love relationship is bigger than the sum of the parts, as the saying goes. When you find someone whom you decide to love, which means you will be giving the gift of yourself to them with no strings attached and they will be giving the gift of themselves to you with no strings attached for the rest of your lives (that part is important), you begin to build this “relationship” which is the two of you and more than the two of you. I like to think of it as a safe place where you can just be and no one is going to judge you, or hold anything against you, or keep tabs on who has been giving more or less than the other person.

How Deep is Your Love?

Now this kind of thing requires a great deal of trust, which is why you can’t enter into it thinking that it has the shelf life of ripe avocados. No, this thing you are entering into together better last longer than Twinkies® or there’s no way you’d be that open, that vulnerable, that giving with someone. Love is making yourself as open to another human being as you can be, and if you can’t trust that they will love you no matter what they see behind your carefully groomed facade, then the experiment is doomed to failure and the “relationship” will be a sham. The only way it can work is if the both of you decide that the “relationship” is a treasure that is more valuable to you than any earthly treasure you can imagine, even greater than any earthly treasure you possess which you willingly give to your lover with no strings attached (that means no pre-nups). Even worth more to you than finding relief from the hard work and pain of self-discovery that being in a relationship inflicts on you from time to time.

In this video, Adam Ericksen and I discuss love as gift and I share a time early in my marriage when things were so bad no one would have blamed my husband Keith for leaving me. And if you follow this link you will find a wonderful description of the Custodian pattern, the one we are all striving for in our love relationships, along with a video dramatization of a Custodian couple (the couple is played by two actors who just happened to be in love!).

Take The Wicked Truth About Love quiz to find out if you fall into the Custodian, Sidekick, Rock, Star, Super Hero, Celebrity Chef, Best Friend Forever or one of the other patterns. Whatever is getting you tangled up on the way to love, learning about the triangular nature of desire is sure to help you back on your feet again – romantically speaking!

The Wicked Truth About Love: The Tangles of Desire contains a full discussion of the triangular nature of desire and all the tangles, including advice on how to get untangled and back on the path to love. Just in time for Valentine’s Day!

The Wicked Truth About Love

Valentine's Day

Previous Post

February 12, 2015

Who is God? Part 3: The Son of God: How the Son Subverts Violence and Patriarchy

Next Post

February 14, 2015 Chapel Hill, Atheism, and the Worship of Violence

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Atonement and Current Events Curriculum Faith and Families Interviews Jesus the Forgiving Victim Lent Montessori politics Reviews The Bible Explained Uncategorized Valentine's Day Wednesday Sermon Who is God?

Select a Month July 2020 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 January 2014 December 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz