Being Loved Despite Flaws and Foibles!

Today I was reading a New York Times OpEd piece from June 15, 2013, written by Tim Kreider and it had such wonderful wisdom that I thought I'd share some of the highlights in this posting. The funny thing about this column is that just minutes before reading this article I had been thinking some very similar thoughts. 

Mr. Kreider mentions about how he received an email which wasn't meant for him, but was about him. Ugh! We've all done something similarly stupid. You respond to an email, making humorous (to you), snarky, or hurtful comments and it accidentally includes the person about which you are writing. Mr. Kreider didn't exactly take offense to what was written...

"What was surprisingly wounding wasn’t that the e-mail was insulting but simply that it was unsympathetic. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads" [emphasis added] (Kreider).

That last sentence is unequivocally accurate. Despite my best efforts not to live in the past, I cannot get past a similar thought to Mr. Kreider's - about "what little allegiance we command" from those people for whom we consider friends and family. We'd all like to think that the love and affection from friends and family is absolute. But then he (accurately) points out that we are all guilty of doing the exact same thing:

"Needless to say, this makes us embarrassed and angry and damn our betrayers as vicious two-faced hypocrites. Which, in fact, we all are. We all make fun of one another behind one another’s backs, even the people we love. Of course we do — they’re ridiculous. Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating: making the same obvious mistakes over and over, dating imbeciles, endlessly relapsing into their dumb addictions and self-defeating habits, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant contradictions and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them miserable. (And those few people about whom there is nothing ridiculous are by far the most preposterous of all.)"  (Kreider)

But does that indicate that we truly don't care about the friend or family member for which we are maligning. Definitely not...

"The operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity...We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time" (Kreider).

Mr. Kreider makes the valid point that even though we may occasionally say things for which others might take offense, it does not mean that we do not care about these people. In fact the opposite is true, we care just as much about them because of their idiosyncrasies. I am struggling how to apply this knowledge to past friendships for which I feel I was intentionally slighted, but I know that there is a overall valid lesson in what Mr. Kreider writes.

You can read the entire text here: I Know What You Think of Me. It's well worth a few minutes out of your life to read.