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People cannot fulfill your needs. They may want to, they may
try to. They may convince you that they can, but they cannot.
What people can do for one another is make the need seem less
urgent. We distract one another so that we forget, temporarily,
what we need. We help one another replace a pressing need
with something else. In the meantime, the need does not disappear.
It dissipates. In a nutshell, people need love. God is love.
What we need is God, but that's too esoteric for most of us to
handle. It's also pretty frightening!
To say we need God conjures up some pretty frightening
images for most of us, the most frightening of all being those
things we believe we will have to give up to get to God. Instead,
we say we need the love of another person because this is the
kind of love most of us believe we can handle -- to some degree
or another. We also think we need a house, a car, a few kids,
and a job so that we can feed the kids. Of course, these things
are important, even essential to our well-being, but what we
really need to live on, and live in, is love. We also think that
things and people bring more love into our lives. Do they? On
some level they do. What they do in actuality is provide us with
the opportunity to share the love we are and the love we have
within, which is God's love.
We are not always aware of how our needs lead us into dark
corners. Try as we might to be alert, strong, and positive when
it comes to love matters, many of us seem to always end up
someplace we do not want to be -- alone in the meantime,
looking for a relationship.
Over the years, I have heard absolute horror stories about
the goings-on called love. At times I have been amazed that we
could believe that something as divine as love could show up
looking so ridiculous. In other situations, I have been appalled
at the foul things people do in the name of love. Finally, I had
to stop. To smack myself. To realize -- there is a pattern here!
The players are different. The events are different, but
somewhere underneath it all there is a sameness. Men and women
have a tendency to do the same things when they are trying to
get their needs met. I decided to keep a list. I wrote down the
thirteen most common things we do in search of love or a
relationship in which we want to be loved. Each of these things
will inevitably fail to meet our needs. They will take us to a
hellish meantime experience:
1. All the signs say this is not the one, but you ignore
your internal alarms, and move ahead into a love
fantasy.
2. Because you fear being alone, or because you believe
you cannot have what you want in a relationship, you
accept the first person who comes along, only to be
left, beaten, ripped off, or impregnated and then left,
beaten, ripped off.
3. You confuse friendship and niceness with romantic
love.
4. Because someone is nice to you and you are not used
to it, you don't know how to say no to them when you
realize they are not who you want.
5. You get caught up in the packaging and promises.
6. You force your desires for a relationship onto another
person, or issue an ultimatum. Because the person
does not know how to say no, s/he goes along with
you . . . for a while.
7. Because the other person expresses an interest in you,
you respond without really exploring if this is who or
what you want.
8. You allow blind faith, which leads to blind love, to take
you into a relationship that is unhealthy.
9. You choose to believe that what your partner has done
to another person, s/he will not do to you.
10. Sexual compatibility is mistaken for love.
11. You stay in a relationship although you are miserable,
trying to work things out even when your partner
shows no interest in working through the difficulty.
12. You don't express what you really feel because you
believe it will hurt your partner's feelings.
13. You choose to believe your partner's lies even when
you know the truth. You act like you do not know
what is going on when you do.
LOVE IS NOTHING THAT GIVES YOU EVERYTHING
What can you do when a relationship is not going the way you
would like? When things are not working the way you want
them to work? How do you learn to take what you have and
make it work to your advantage? As I ask these questions, I am
reminded of a story I heard about a woman named Luanne
Bellarts, who was born with cerebral palsy. As a result of this
disease, Luanne had full use of one toe, on one foot. Raised by
very religious parents, she learned a great deal about truth,
trust, patience, faith, and love as it related to her capabilities. I
am sure most of us would consider this kind of physical
limitation to be an insurmountable or monumental defeat. Luanne,
however, learned to type on a computer keyboard using her big
toe. She wrote the story of her life, Bird with a Broken Wing, in
this way. Her book was her testimony to the power of faith, in
which she eloquently described how to turn trouble into
triumph, tragedy into victory. She wrote about the meantime,
about learning how to take what you are, what you have, and
what you can do, and make it work for you.
Luanne's story is not about relationships per se. It is,
however, about principles. Truth, trust, patience, honor, and faith
are the cornerstone principles of all life's relationships. They are
also all the things we receive in the presence of unconditional
love. Having learned so much about family relationships,
friendships, and, more important, the selfship, Luanne documented
how to develop and nurture all relationships with the vigilant
employment of loving principles. What she learned while lying
flat on her back, sitting in a wheelchair, and being totally
dependent on others is exactly what we able-bodied beings stumble
over, muddle through, fall into, and fail to recognize about
relationships. Although Luanne never experienced an intimate,
loving relationship with a man, the way we believe it should be,
she did with one toe, on one foot, what we spend most of our
lives trying to do. She discovered love. Love for herself. The love
for and of others. The love of God. She figured out what love
looks like and what it should not look like. She understood what
love felt like and what it felt like when there is an absence of
love. She discovered how to find love, nurture it, and make it
last in yourself, for yourself, and within your life. At age thirty-
six, Luanne died of cancer. In the meantime, during the course
of her life, she lived in and for love with a tremendous amount
of dignity. Finding love and maintaining our dignity is
something we often struggle to do in our relationships. The
experience of the struggle is called the meantime.
Excerpt from IN THE MEANTIME, copyright © 1998 by Iyanla Vanzant. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
