Love Does Not Compel

Anonymous

If you or someone you know is suffering from any form of abuse, please reach out to someone you trust or one of the many helpful hotlines available (such as the National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233).

Recently, I found out a friend of mine who I admired very much had been abusing a secret lover of theirs.

This was a shock to me, naturally. It was also shocking to me how hard it was to decide to “do the right thing,” whatever that means. We all know the answers: if someone is abusive to you, leave them, and if your friend is abusive to someone else, don’t support them. It is easy to say these things, but in practice, it is quite hard to follow through. The reason for that is also quite simple. We want to believe the best of the people we love, and when they are struggling, we want to help them get better.

I think one of the greatest and sweetest lies underlying the cycle of abuse is the hope, the wish, that loving someone is enough to change them.

This is what enables the honeymoon period in the cycle of abuse, when the abuser apologizes, explains they were just going through some difficult things, and swears up and down that they’ll really try to change this time. If they have another chance, they can make things different. And if you love them, you should give them another chance. 

Will Love Fix Someone?

Maybe if you are loving enough, and understanding enough, and if you are accommodating and supportive enough, they will be able to get their act together and become a better person… At least, that’s how the logic goes. But it is a fundamentally flawed logic, for two reasons.

First, if loving them could “fix” them, they would have changed by now, because you already love them.

Second, loving someone will not fix them.

It also will not change them, and it will not save them. No; what loving someone does is it invites a response. We can see this in how God loves humankind. Jesus’ great sacrifice did not make us into better people. It did something more fragile and precious than that: it gave us the chance to see another possibility, and to choose, on our own, to change.

But love cannot change us, for us. We have to want to do that ourselves. 

Who is Responsible?

Everyone is responsible for their own choices. My friend is responsible for their life, just as I am responsible for mine. God loves me but He does not change me. He helps me change in the way that I, myself, have already decided to change.

An abuser does not have an incentive to change if their victim remains with them, or if their friends do not leave them, or if their loved ones do not hold them accountable for what they’ve done. If I want better for them — and I do — then I can only give them that incentive to change, and hope they will choose to do so. Loving my friend does not mean I should absolve my friend of their actions. Rather, to love someone is to give them the full weight of responsibility for what they choose.

God respects our free will and autonomy enough to let us choose to walk away from paradise and into hell. I think it is only right that I extend this courtesy to the people I love as well. Of course, I will hope and pray. But whether my loved ones will make the choice I hope—

Well. That’s between them and God. 

Reflection Questions:

1. What does it mean to “fix” someone? How did Jesus treat those who we might deem as needing “fixing” in His time?

2. What does Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection imply about what it means to change if we put our faith in Him? Can we change on our own?

3. Does the type of relationship (i.e. friend, co-worker, child, etc.) affect how we should approach trying to see someone change? Should we hope for people to change?

4. What does it mean to love someone who has abused another? What does it look like to love and forgive someone who wronged or continues to wrong others? Does it mean we ignore the ramifications of their actions?

The author of this article is a writer, artist, and engineer living on the West Coast of the U.S. after graduating from college, with a deep interest in language, philosophy of consciousness, and the interplay between fantasy and reality. They enjoy looking for wildlife while on walks in nature.