Does He Love Me? - Part 1C: The Complexity of Loving as Human Beings

In the last section, we discovered that the clearest standard for authentic love is not our own experience, our emotions, or even another person's words. The clearest standard for authentic love is Jesus Christ.

Yet if Christ is our standard, why is answering the question, Does he love me? still so difficult?

The answer lies, at least in part, in the complexity of loving as human beings.

One of the greatest challenges in discerning authentic love is that we are not comparing Christ with Christ. We are trying to understand imperfect human beings in the light of the perfect love of God.

Every one of us longs to love and to be loved. We were created for love because we were created in the image of a God who is love. Yet every one of us loves imperfectly. We all have wounds, fears, blind spots, sinful tendencies, and unhealthy patterns that influence both the way we love and the way we perceive love.

Only God loves perfectly.

Recognizing this protects us from expecting perfection from ourselves or from another human being. Every marriage will experience ordinary human failures. We will misunderstand one another. We will become impatient, communicate poorly, act selfishly, and sometimes say or do things that cause pain. We all fall short of God's design.

But this truth must never be used to minimize betrayal.

There is a profound difference between the ordinary imperfections that exist in every marriage and the devastating wounds created by persistent deception, sexual acting out, manipulation, gaslighting, and betrayal. Both fall short of God's design, but they are not the same.

Understanding that distinction is essential because confusing ordinary human weakness with ongoing patterns of deception and betrayal makes discernment far more difficult.

Part of what makes discernment so challenging is that every human being instinctively protects himself or herself from pain. Sometimes that instinct helps us endure hardship. At other times, it leads us to cling to interpretations of reality that feel safer than the truth.

We minimize.

We rationalize.

We hope.

We avoid.

We convince ourselves that we have more control than we actually do.

This is not unique to betrayed partners.

It is not unique to addicts.

It is part of the human condition.

We are all capable of holding realities that seem to conflict with one another. We may genuinely love another person while simultaneously making choices that wound him or her. We may know the truth and still struggle to face it because accepting it feels overwhelming. We may desire what is good while choosing what is familiar, comfortable, or immediately gratifying instead.

This does not mean that authentic love and harmful choices are the same.

It means that the human heart is often more complicated than we would like it to be.

That complexity exists within every one of us.

It is one of the reasons the question, Does he love me? cannot bear the weight we often place upon it.

Loving feelings, sincere intentions, moments of remorse, or spoken words alone cannot answer the deeper question our hearts are asking.

If they could, discernment would be easy.

Instead, because human beings are capable of both love and profound contradiction, we need something more trustworthy than our own interpretations.

We need a standard outside ourselves.

As we discovered in the last section, that standard is Jesus Christ.

The goal of this series is not to teach you how to read another person's heart. Only God sees the human heart perfectly.

The goal is to help you discern reality more clearly through the light of Jesus Christ.

In the next section, we will turn to Scripture—not simply for another description of love, but for a practical framework that helps us discern whether the love of Christ is becoming visible in the relationships we actually experience.

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Next in the Series

Part 1D: Discerning Authentic Love

➡️ Continue Reading (Coming soon!)

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