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I’d know Don loved me because I have experienced how Don has treated me during times of tremendous joy, paralyzing sadness, and lingering uncertainty. In a word, He’s been “with” me.
Good friends do that; they guard each other when things get scary by putting themselves in between their friends and what could harm them.
and love makes us both strong and weak at the same time.
I think that’s the difference between being loved and making people clap, though. Love can’t be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.
I thought about it and told her something I’d learned about myself in the year I spent pursuing her. I’d learned my default mode was to perform. Even in small groups I feel like I have to be “on.” But when I’m alone my energy comes back. When I’m alone I don’t have to perform for anybody. She said I didn’t have to perform for her. She didn’t have to say that. I knew it was true. Who else do you marry but the person who pulls you off the stage?
I’d spent years isolated and alone, working up words to tell people who I was—or more accurately, who I wanted to be. But in many ways that was a dark and lonely life. I’m not saying it didn’t have its perks, because people clapping for you will always be a nice thing. But it’s better when you have somebody to go home to and talk about it with, somebody who is more in love with you than impressed by you.
This book is about how I realized I could have a happy life without splitting an atom or making a splash. It’s true our lives can pass small and unnoticed by the masses, and we are no less dignified for having lived quietly. In fact, I’ve come to believe there’s something noble about doing little with your life save offering love to a person who is offering it back.
I don’t mean to overstate what is yet unknown, but part of me believes when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it.
But when you’re in it, when you say all those words and don’t mean them a couple months later, you feel like a fool. You wonder if your words have power anymore, and what is a man if his words are weakened?
The strongest character in a story isn’t the hero, it’s the guide. Yoda. Haymitch. It’s the guide who gets the hero back on track. The guide gives the hero a plan and enough confidence to enter the fight. The guide has walked the path of the hero and has the advice and wisdom to get the hero through their troubles so they can beat the resistance.
He drew a larger circle around the small circle, making something like a target. Inside the second circle he wrote the word shame. Bill said at some point I realized, whether true or not, there was something wrong with me. Either I didn’t measure up to the standards of my parents, the kids at school made fun of me, or I came to believe I was inferior. Shame, he said, caused me to hide. “And that,” he said, “is a problem. Because the more we hide, the harder it is to be known. And we have to be known to connect.”
this outer circle was the false self we create to cover our shame. He said it was in this circle where we likely developed what we think of as our personality, or the “character” we learned to play in the theater of life. Bill said some of us learn we only matter if we are attractive or powerful or skilled in some way, but each of us likely has an ace card we believe will make us lovable.
the center circle, at the word self, and said, “This guy, your inner self, is the part of you that gives and receives love. The outer rings are just theater.”
Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Today, when people ask why I became a writer I try to answer honestly. I’m a writer because, at an early age, I became convinced it was the one thing I could do to earn people’s respect.
And let’s face it, most of us wear our jobs like a costume. My entire identity—my distorted sense of value—came almost exclusively from the fact I wrote books.
Interestingly, he said, it wasn’t the rich who separated from the poor, but the opposite. He said people who didn’t feel like they’d accomplished much felt insecure around those who had. Bill said he wished we lived in a world where people couldn’t say what they did at all. He said the world would be a healthier place if nobody were allowed to wear a costume.
I began to wonder what life would be like if I dropped the act and began to trust that being myself would be enough to get the love I needed.
The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life. I like what Viktor Frankl wrote, about how we aren’t designed to spend too much time thinking about ourselves, that we are healthier when we’re distracted by a noble cause. But what do you do when the noble cause is a memoir? You sit around and think about yourself too much.
I thought about that, then, about how much I fear change, even change for the better. I thought about how there are so many lies in fear.
So much deception. What else keeps us from living a better story than fear?
those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.
It’s all connected with the belief human love is conditional. But human love isn’t conditional. No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.
“When I say I love you and you don’t believe me, you’re being a jerk. Basically what you’re saying is I only love conditionally. You think you’re being self-deprecating and funny, but you’re really saying I’m not a good enough person to love you if you have a few flaws. It gets old.”
Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can’t accept their imperfections can’t accept grace either.
“It’s a tough question, you know. The heart of man. I’ve prosecuted some evil people.” He looked at me sadly. “I’m talking about rapists and murderers. Leaders of child sex-trafficking rings. The works. And you want to know what they all have in common, Don?” “What is it?” I asked. “They all think people are out to get them. It’s causing me to wonder if distrust doesn’t bring out the worst in us. I know it’s a complicated issue, because nearly everybody I put in prison has been tragically abused and so it’s natural they don’t trust others and they see life as a kill-or-be-killed drama. But it
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The harshest people I’ve met over the years have had two things in common: they don’t fully trust anybody, and they view relationships as a means to an end.
“It’s worth it to get stung by a jellyfish every once in a while,” Betsy said. “For the occasional sting, you get to go to sleep feeling the waves and you get to giggle with your cousins.” I doubt she realized it, but she was talking about much more than the ocean. She was talking about what it meant to risk yourself on love. It meant diving into the unknown, where there were very real dangers, but mostly rewards.
if I spend the rest of our marriage believing she won’t love me unless I succeed, our marriage will be a disaster. God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he’s going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy. Somewhere along the line I think many of us buy into a lie that we only matter if . . . We only matter if we are strong or smart or attractive or whatever.
the reality is all writing is a subtle form of manipulation, not always malicious, but usually designed to do two things: (1) communicate an idea and (2) make the writer sound intelligent.
It costs personal fear to be authentic but the reward is integrity, and by that I mean a soul fully integrated, no difference between his act and his actual person. Having integrity is about being the same person on the inside that we are on the outside, and if we don’t have integrity, life becomes exhausting.
but attraction isn’t intimacy. What attracts us doesn’t always connect us. I can’t tell you how many friends I have who have been taken in by somebody sexy or powerful or charming but soon after find themselves feeling alone in the relationship. It’s one thing to impress people, but it’s another to love them.
The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.
I felt like a jerk for letting my friend go. But then I realized I didn’t have a healthy relationship with him in the first place. When there are lies in a relationship, it’s not like you’re actually connecting. And I realized another thing too: it wasn’t me who was walking away from my friend. It was my friend who hadn’t played by the rules and was incompatible in a healthy relationship. And here’s another thing that’s strange. After distancing myself from my friend I loved him more, not less. I protected myself for sure, but my anger went away. Once he wasn’t hurting me anymore, I could
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It’s true the manipulator is the loneliest person in the world. And the second loneliest is the person being manipulated. Unless we’re honest with each other, we can’t connect. We can’t be intimate. Only God can penetrate a manipulative person’s heart, and even then, he sits quietly, waiting for them to stop running their con.
I told him it wasn’t obvious but sometimes when a person gets into a bunch of relationships that crash and burn, they’re drawn to drama. Then I told him something my friend John Cotton Richmond once said to me, that 90 percent of people’s problems could be prevented if they’d choose healthier people to give their hearts to.
The backside of Hollywood passion is disappointment and loneliness—and more often than not, resentment and cynicism about the nature of love itself.
Love is wonderful and our getting to know each other was the harvest of a long season of farming. But true intimacy is just like that: it’s the food you grow from well-tilled ground. And like most things good for us, it’s an acquired taste.
To be honest, sometimes I found conversations with him to be tiring. But I realized I only got tired because I was trying to hide.
You’re addicted to some romantic fantasy, but you can’t face the reality that love demands we make a choice and stick with it.”
But at the same time I could feel the silliness of it all. Most of my romantic accomplishments had taken place in my head. And in those stories there was no risk and so no thrill, just the comfort of sugar.
Change only comes when we face the difficulty of reality head-on. Fantasy changes nothing, which is why, once we're done fantasizing, it feels like a bankrupt story.
“Sometimes the real bonding happens in conversations about nothing, Don,” she said. “Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other. And that’s a powerful thing.”
God doesn’t give us crying, pooping children because he wants to advance our careers. He gives them to us for the same reason he confused language at the Tower of Babel, to create chaos and deter us from investing too much energy in the gluttonous idols of self-absorption.
I HAVE A PASTOR FRIEND WHO SAYS THE ROOT OF sin is the desire for control. I think there’s some truth to that. And I’d add the root of control is fear. The reason I had such a rich fantasy life was partially because it gave me a sense of control. There was no risk in my fantasy life, and risk is what I feared the most. After all, to love somebody is to give them the power to hurt you, and nobody can hurt you if you’re the only one writing the script. But it doesn’t work. Controlling people are the loneliest people in the world.
There are times in a man’s life when he says things he will never be able take back. It’s true words can have a physical impact on somebody. A person can concuss with their words. Words can snap as fast as a trap in the woods and leave a victim to writhe for weeks.
They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it’s true. You can’t control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.
We both have our independence and freedom, but we have those things with each other. It’s a paradox, but it works. It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody’s self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.
Sometimes relationships feel like we’re trying to emotionally cuddle with each other at the same time we’re tearing each other down. But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us.
Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you’re rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.
