People wreck their love and their lives right at the starting line, and that is sad.
What set this off was a run of videos of women and men I ran into over the past month, declaring in a whining shout that "anyone who really wants me will take me as I am," and some even added that sentence's broken cousin: "if you love me 'really' you won't ask me to change."
I think you are wrong.
Take a correction: I think you are very wrong.
Take a warning: if you go on believing in this pile of New Age nonsense, you are condemning yourselves to a life of misery.
What exactly is distorted about the "love me as I am" approach? A good and worthy question. I rubbed my eyes this morning, shaved properly, and hereby supply you with four answers of my own. Right, fire:
1] "Love me as I am" is an expression that says nothing.
Exactly like the vague and feeble "self-realisation," this is an amorphous expression into which you can insert any trait, feature, habit, thought and emotion — and equally, you can not.
Come on, nobody hires you as a cook, a programmer, a teacher, a service representative or an architect and simply says to you on your first day at work, "Right, do something."
It doesn't work that way. To function in the world we have to be clear.
And what you have inside your psyche and that brought you this far is anything but precise and clear. It took me twenty-five years to understand that, and I am still investigating.
Don't come at me and sell me the idea that you know exactly what you mean when you say "take me as I am."
And when you open a relationship with a demand that is impossible to fulfil, no good will come of it.
2] It takes a great deal of time to get to know you.
How long did it take you to get yourself sorted and go out into the world in search of mature love? Twenty years? Twenty-five? Thirty?
Bottom line, it took you time to look inward at the psyche, to observe its alleyways, to form a position on who you are and what suits you, and to start scouting the fields of the unattached.
And you still aren't entirely settled about yourself — wait for point 4.
If we apply the logic of a five-year-old here, does it seem reasonable to you that a potential suitor could grasp your complexity in a reasonable way within two or three weeks, when it took you your whole life?
That's how it works, friends — in order to love you "as you are," they first have to know you.
And that takes a great deal of time.
And a great deal of patience.
3] Most important: nobody cares who you are. They care how you behave.
People, when will you internalise that humanity judges purely your actions and not your soul?
There are two main reasons the focus in relationships goes to behaviours and not to personality.
The first reason is that personality cannot be seen; only your actions toward your beloved and toward your environment can be seen.
The second reason is that a relationship is something that must advance and develop all the time.
And how does a relationship advance, children?
Exactly as you thought — through actions, initiatives, decisions — and the carrying out of those decisions.
Otherwise, we are stuck at the stage of staring across a first date, in the good case.
Or at the stage of disappearing after the first, awkward time in bed, in the bad case.
4] Most painful: you aren't good enough yet. "Who you are" will have to change.
At this point in time, you aren't worthy of being a partner and you aren't worthy of being a parent.
Don't panic. We all started that way.
The question is not whether you are suited to it right now — you aren't — but whether you have the potential to grow and develop and properly fill that role in the future.
And in most cases, the happy answer is "yes."
But for that, you will have to change.
I'm not talking about the idiotic "reinvent yourself"; I'm talking about realising your adult potential.
And for that to happen, don't you dare settle for someone who will love you as you are.
Build yourself a relationship with someone who challenges you, who pushes you to be more than who you are right now.
And who is willing for you to do the same for her.