Seeing understanding as a strategy to feel love 😻

I don’t know about you, but I often want to understand stuff. I also like being understood. 

It’s common to assume that this is a good thing. Why wouldn’t we want understanding? Well, what if it’s obscuring a deeper desire? What if “wanting to be understood” is a strategy to get love?

Then it’s:

  – Closing off many of the other ways you can receive love that don’t involve understanding (like cooking together, touch, helping watch each other’s kids, etc)

  – Instrumentalizing other people (or information, or experiments, or whatever); they’re no longer a unique and infinitely unknowable ‘thou’ who will change you and them and the relationship in an honest encounter, they’re a need-fulfiller who must abide by my rules.

  – Self-reifying: When I need you to understand me according to how I like to be known, I limit the “understanding” to how I already know myself and lock myself into this identity. Ironically this self I want to affirm is partially defined by the pain of longing for love, therefore defending the thing I’m hoping love will transform.

  – Therefore often going to leave me frustrated: Love utterly transforms us. The feeling I often crave is not to rehash what I know, but to be shown something new, shocking, wonderful.

Understanding is delightful! I love understanding, that’s what we’re doing right here and right now. The question is where it comes from and what it’s for. Is it playful? Curious? Seeking love or truth in a way that reveals more mysteries and questions? I find this kind of understanding generative of the good things we almost all agree on: Honesty, compassion, wisdom, gratitude, generosity. 

I noticed this pattern of understanding being a means to an end in Relateful sessions; both in myself and others. Practically, seeing this pattern helps me respond to the actual call for love in myself and in others, instead of getting distracted by stuff like language, strategies, scripts.

And, Relatefulness already short-circuits instrumentalization by declaring that we relate for the sake of itself rather than getting anywhere.

Love is the experience instead of a goal.

With love, Jordan