When Being Loved Becomes the Measure

by Rockenroll.com

There is a difference between being loved for who we are and being loved for who other people believe we are.

People can only respond to what they are allowed to see. They know the stories they have been told, the behavior they have witnessed, the personality presented to them, and the parts of a life they have been invited into. They cannot judge what has been withheld from them.

That makes the idea of measuring someone’s heart by how much they are loved by others far more complicated than it first appears.

A person can be surrounded by affection and admiration while different people know very different versions of them. Friends may know one version. Family may know another. Coworkers may see another. Romantic partners may encounter something entirely different.

Each person’s affection can be completely genuine.

But their affection is based on the person they know.

That distinction matters.

Being loved by many people doesn’t necessarily tell us how completely someone is known. And it doesn’t necessarily tell us how well that person loves others.

It tells us that the versions of themselves those people have experienced are lovable to them.

This is where love and validation can begin to overlap.

If being loved becomes evidence of personal worth, then other people’s affection can become extraordinarily important. Being wanted, admired, pursued, missed, included, or needed provides reassurance:

I matter.

People care about me.

People want me in their lives.

I must be a good person because people love me.

But there is a fundamental problem with using other people’s affection as that kind of evidence.

They can only love what they know.

The same is true of loyalty. Someone may point to the people who have remained beside them for years as evidence of who they are. But loyalty is also based on what those people know. Someone can remain fiercely loyal to the person they have experienced while knowing very little about the parts of that person’s life that were never shared with them.

And what they know may not be the whole person.

That doesn’t make their love false. The affection may be completely sincere. But it means the affection itself cannot establish the character of the person receiving it.

This also helps separate loving from being loved.

Love is not simply being afraid of losing someone. Fear of loss tells us how important someone’s presence is to us and what we fear experiencing without them.

Love is also not measured simply by how many people want us in their lives.

Love includes not wanting to hurt someone.

That turns the question around.

Instead of How much do other people love me?, it asks:

What happens to the people who love me?

Do I protect their trust?

Do I care about the effect my choices have on them?

Do I allow them to know enough of the truth to decide for themselves who they are loving?

Because ultimately, being loved is evidence of someone else’s feelings toward us.

It isn’t necessarily evidence of our own capacity to love.

The Person Who Knows the Other Side

Then there may be someone who has seen what others haven’t.

That person can understand why someone is loved and admired while also knowing behavior that would complicate that picture. They aren’t necessarily seeing a different person. They may simply have been given access to a part of that person others have never seen.

That creates an important distinction.

Ten people can sincerely love someone without knowing what the eleventh person knows.

Their love isn’t false. Their experience isn’t false. But neither necessarily represents the whole person.

Being loved by others tells us how people respond to what they know about us. It cannot tell us how they would feel if they knew what they haven’t been shown.

And the more selectively people know us, the less their affection can tell us about the person they have never been given the opportunity to see.