More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This guy kept giving me a lot of theater about how he’d changed but didn’t have a story. Characters only change when they live through a story.
A scorekeeper makes life feel like a contest, only there’s no way to win. Scorekeepers are in control of the scoreboard and frame it any way they want, but always in such a way they’re winning.
Both Betsy and David are truth tellers. There isn’t an ounce of guile in either. It’s intimidating. I’ve never known either of them to exaggerate, flop, intimidate, or romanticize a circumstance beyond what is real and true. But here’s the other thing they offer, and I think it’s what helped me learn to be more true. They offer grace. I’m talking about the kind of grace in which they assume I’m a really great guy who’s just trying to figure things out, and they politely show me the error of my ways.
what a safe person is. They say it’s somebody who speaks the truth in grace.
when we don’t believe we are good or lovable, we isolate.
“It’s true you’re bad at relationships,” I said, “but it’s also true you are good at them. They’re both true, old friend.” I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that.
THE PEOPLE with the healthiest self-esteem are also the greatest at intimacy. I’m not talking about arrogant people. I’m talking about people who know they are both good and bad yet believe at the deepest level they are really good for people. It’s a beautiful moment when somebody wakes up to this reality, when they realize God created them so other people could enjoy them, not just endure them.
She doesn’t try to change people, she just knows when people spend enough time together, they become like each other.
She went on and on and talked about all the ways I was making her a better person. Not long after that conversation I found I enjoyed getting together with people a great deal more. Whereas before I’d endure having to get coffee with people, I began to enjoy sharing a bit of our stories. I realized that one of the reasons I’d been so isolated was because I’d subconsciously believed I wasn’t all that good for people.
I know we’re not perfect, but I wonder how many people are withholding the love they could provide because they secretly believe they have fatal flaws.
half the feeling of home is usually a person.
“Every day fifty thousand people climb out of these buildings and crawl into your neighborhood. And every one of them works for somebody who is never allowed to express themselves. This is a town in which you get ahead by staying on script. You become whoever it is people want you to be or you’re out of a job.” Suddenly DC made sense.
I tend to connect most easily with two kinds of people, those who are creating something and those who are easily vulnerable. Both trees grow from the same root, I think, and that’s the willingness to take risks.
Being afraid to love and being paralyzed at the keyboard both involve a fear of being known, a fear of making mistakes, a fear of being found lacking.
succeeding in a career is not unlike walking on a tightrope. The more success we achieve, the higher the rope. As we gain something, we have more to lose. Success causes a ravine beneath our careers that grows more deadly, creating a kind of fear of trying.
It’s like Bronnie Ware was saying, if we go to our graves with our feelings still in us, we will die with regrets.
I am willing to sound dumb. I am willing to be wrong. I am willing to be passionate about something that isn’t perceived as cool. I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I’m afraid. I’m willing to contradict something I’ve said before. I’m willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I’m willing to apologize. I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.
He just keeps saying the same thing, softly, as though from some other planet: We need each other. There’s no reason to judge. People are more fragile than you could possibly imagine. I now consider Jamie one of my closest friends. He’s the one to call me when I say something unkind online. He reminds me people are hurting and we are supposed to be bigger than the Darwinian games that tempt us.
The more fully we live into ourselves, the more impact we will have. Acting may get us the applause we want, but taking a risk on being ourselves is the only path toward true intimacy. And true intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.
A COMMON CHARACTERISTIC OF healthy families, though. The characteristic is this: kids with parents who are honest about their shortcomings seem to do better in life.
not kids will do okay in life. There are too many variables. But I believe vulnerability in parenting increases the chance a kid will grow up to become healthy and content in life. If you think about it, parents who are open and honest with their kids create an environment in which children are allowed to be human. And, sadly, parents who hide their flaws unknowingly create an environment where kids feel the need to hide. And feeling the need to hide our true selves from the world is rarely healthy.
Environments in which we are encouraged to hide our faults are toxic.
there’s a difference between apologizing and asking forgiveness,” he said. “An apology is a statement, as informal as a press release, but asking forgiveness involves giving power to the person you’re seeking forgiveness from. I had to give my kids the power to choose whether they wanted intimacy with me, whether they wanted to forgive me. That’s a terrifying and clarifying moment.”
Then, Paul remembered a Bible verse from 1 John. He said that John, in summarizing all that he’d learned about God, said this: “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” “When you are with God,” Paul said, “there is no darkness, no hiding, no pretending. When you are with God, you have the freedom and courage to be yourself.”
He said unless people feel safe around us, intimacy would never happen.
I decided I wouldn’t judge my kids. No matter what they told me, I wouldn’t judge them. I might have to discipline them, but I wouldn’t make them feel like lesser people for their mistakes.
If honesty is the key to intimacy, it means we don’t have to be perfect and, moreover, we don’t have to pretend to be perfect.
A good story makes you thankful to be alive because it reminds you that while sometimes painful, life is indeed beautiful and even magical.
I’m starting to wonder if that’s not the whole point of life, to be thankful for it and to live in such a way others are thankful for theirs as well.
If a man has no sense of meaning, Frankl argued, he will numb himself with pleasure.
He prayed that they’d embrace a mission to teach other people to create communities that loved each other, as they’d experienced with him. When I read the passage, though, I saw it differently. He wasn’t just calling them into a life of sacrifice. He was calling them into a life of meaning, even the kind of meaning that would involve suffering. Suffering for a redemptive reason is hardly suffering, after all.
thirty coaches working beneath him and they coached hundreds of executives who were worth billions of dollars and not one of them, in the history of his coaching business, could sustain any kind of success if their relational lives were unhealthy.
“It means they’re going somewhere,” Al said. “All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something. My question to you,” Al said seriously, “is, where is the relationship you’ve started with this woman going?”
I’d made the mistake of becoming a reactionary in my relational life. I let friendships, business relationships, and even my relationship with Betsy take a natural course rather than guiding them to a healthy place.
The love was healing and she was changing because of it. Soon she’d grow into a child who could not only receive love but give it back to those asking the same questions we are all asking: Do I matter? Am I worth your sacrifice?
Codependency happens when too much of your sense of validation or security comes from somebody else.
She stopped the session and asked me why I spent so much time wondering what other people were thinking. “That’s going to drive you crazy, Don,” she said. “Just ask yourself if you’re happy and what you want in a relationship and that’s it. What’s going on in other people’s minds is none of your business.”
I realized there wasn’t another girl on the planet with whom I was more compatible to have a healthy relationship, and if there was another girl, I never wanted to meet her.
What differentiates true Christianity from the pulp many people buy into is that Jesus never offers that completion here on earth. He only asks us to trust him and follow him to the metaphorical wedding we will experience in heaven.
I wondered if some of my early mistakes in relationships weren’t partly because I sought to find resolution for the longing through a woman, a burden no romantic partner should have to bear. How many relationships have been ruined by two people attempting to squeeze the Jesus out of each other?
I don’t know if there’s a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.
What else changes a person but the living of a story? And what is a story but the wanting for something difficult and the willingness to work for it?
I suppose that’s the point of this book. There’s truth in the idea we’re never going to be perfect in love but we can get close. And the closer we get, the healthier we will be. Love is not a game any of us can win, it’s just a story we can live and enjoy. It’s a noble ambition, then, to add a chapter to the story of love, and to make our chapter a good one.
