let yourself be loved
the subtle block in the way of creating lasting relationships
An obvious, but at times hard-to-see truth about love and relationships: no one is perfect, and no relationship will be perfect, especially right out of the gate. Relationships are built collaboratively between two people who want them to work—they are co-created. Relationships are a shared craft dedicated to making the most loving, nurturing, and enriching container for those inside it to exist safely in. The reasons relationships don’t work out are numerous (a lack of compatibility, misaligned values, different visions of the future), but one I don’t see talked about often enough is the unwillingness for one or both partners to simply let themselves be loved.
There is no shortage of wonderful humans who many would be lucky to find themselves deeply entrenched with romantically. But I see a common theme in those who say they want love—lasting, deep, heart-opening love—but when it arrives in some form, seem to systemically find a way to block it, push it away, or find some reason that it is not the “right kind of love” for them.
letting yourself be loved is a prerequisite to being loved
To let yourself be loved is to open your heart entirely to another person, to stand in full vulnerability, to let someone see all your light and shadow, and to trust them to accept and love you regardless of what they find. It means honestly revealing who you are, including the parts of yourself that you don’t love showing to people (including yourself). It means holding space for the affection and depth of interest they have for you. It means not shying away when they open their heart back to you, tell you how they feel, how they feel about you. It is fundamentally about being willing to receive love without recoiling. It is about eroding limiting beliefs like “when someone is into me, perhaps it’s because I’m better than them and therefore I shouldn’t be into them”, or “If I show them who I really am, they will lose interest and leave, so I should keep them at a comfortable distance where they can’t really see me.”
Letting yourself be loved is about pure, unadulterated surrender. It is about looking the prospect of love in the eye and not blinking, not shying away, not leaning into your fear, but instead leaning into the hope of being met where you’re at, welcoming the possibility of being fully received by someone and fully receiving them in return. It is about building a shared vision that rests on a foundation of trust. It is about holding each other through the times where you both realize you aren’t the perfect beings you often present yourself as. It is about accepting one another as you are, loving each other for all of the messiness and imperfections you possess. It is about allowing the love to come through, getting out of its way, working through the resistance. It is about standing unwavering in love.
to let yourself be loved, first let yourself be seen
We are all a little rough around the edges. We all have a shadow, because anything that has light has shadow. To let yourself be loved, you need to reveal both your light and shadow to who you are with. You need to let yourself be fully seen—and allow them to hold and accept you for all that they see.
But why is it so hard to reveal yourself honestly to someone?
I’ve thought a lot about this, because it does seem to be a universal challenge: to be who you truly are in front of someone—without polish or reservations. Without anything concealed. Perhaps it’s because most of us are not even this revealing to ourselves. A quote that captures this well from a book I’m reading:
“When you’re young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple. Any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn’t that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren’t brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent.” — Fredrik Backman, The Winners
Many of us haven’t even seen ourselves in the raw state that love demands from us. Because our shadow is just as scary to ourselves as it is to others. More scary, actually—that’s what makes it our shadow. Our shadow is what we keep unconscious, what we reject, despise, are scared or ashamed to face in ourselves. But once we look at ourselves honestly, with a full willingness to accept what we find, our shadow is no longer something we need to bury from ourselves and others. It becomes something we can integrate, accept and reveal to those we love. Because it no longer feels like the thing that makes us unlovable, dangerous, or less-than the person we want to be.
When we look at ourselves honestly, we enable ourselves to reveal who we are to others with that same level of openness and truth. When we accept ourselves and love ourselves for every part of our being, we allow others to do the same. As that quote touches on so elegantly: we crave invisibility over transparency, because invisibility demands less of us. It’s easier to shield ourselves from our flaws than it is to look right at them. And earnest love demands nothing less than the complete confrontation of the self.
The way we see ourselves is generally not symmetrical with who we truly are. There’s a saying that, “trying to look at ourselves objectively is like trying to touch our right elbow with our right hand.” Impossible, but an illusion that can be fun to toy with. Our identity is much closer to the way we present ourselves to the rest of the world—at an arms length, without much intimacy—rather than who we are underneath all that polish and poise. Our identity is who we want to be, who we wish we were, not who we are. But to be loved fully, we need to let every nook, cranny and crevice of our emotional being be seen. And that, quite frankly, can be terrifying. But! When you reveal yourself fully and are loved anyway, you see that there is no part of you that is inherently unlovable, and the only person perpetuating that belief was you.
When you are loved healthily, you realize that it was you—not anyone else!—that was keeping yourself from being seen. And when you arrive at this realization, it’s as though your whole being is liberated from invisible shackles that were restraining a part of your essence, a part of you that you didn’t think deserved love.
maybe it’s not a person you haven’t found, but a part of yourself you haven’t looked at
We talk a lot about the pipeline problem in dating (and I did, here): how hard it is to meet people, how hard it is to find “your person”, but here I want to hone in on the question of: once you’ve found someone you like, why is it so hard to let the relationship evolve? Why is there so much resistance to letting someone in? Why is it so hard to let go of the games once you’ve won the prize (someone you want to deepen with)? Why is it so hard to simply allow someone to love you?
If you never master this piece of the puzzle (allowing yourself to be loved), you will always be fixated on the pipeline issue when it is no longer the reason you aren’t in the right relationship. Eventually, it is no longer about finding better potential partners—it is about admitting that no matter who you find, you will always be trapped by your own unwillingness to let them love you.
By fixating on generating more optionality, you can blind yourself to the fact that your own internal armour is keeping the relationship from progressing, rather than a flaw in your current partner, or the absence of your ‘ideal’ one. As I said earlier:
There is no perfect person, no perfect relationship. There are only two people who feel strongly enough about each other to endure the challenges of communicating openly and co-creating an intentional, loving relationship. Two seemingly mismatched people that love each other and earnestly want to make it work beat two seamlessly compatible people that won’t let each other in, 100% of the time.
When you shift from striving for requirements or metrics in the person you want to be with, to looking for a mutual openness you both share in allowing the relationship to blossom, the way you see love changes. It is no longer a pursuit of making yourself a better magnet for high-value partners. It is now about shaping yourself into someone capable of creating a meaningful, lasting relationship. Someone who has accepted themselves fully and is willing to let themselves be loved.
the depth of a relationship is limited by the openness of its components
A connection can only grow as deeply as you both allow it to. If you notice a pattern where you keep finding wonderful people and seem to get stuck at a certain point of maturity in the relationship, it might be because there is a certain threshold at which you stop allowing the other person in. And no amount of requirements you set out for the other person will be able to solve that for you. Only you can let the relationship go deeper by letting yourself be loved more deeply.
I don’t mean to say that letting yourself be loved is an easy task. It’s not—like many fundamental truths: it’s simple, but not easy. To let yourself be loved, you need to look at and accept the parts of you that feel unlovable to you. The parts that you have hidden, that you wish weren’t a part of you. Because if you don’t look at them, how could you expect anyone else to see and accept them in you? The whole point of accepting yourself is to demonstrate to yourself that there is nothing inherently wrong with you. And when you accept yourself fully, you get to a point where you are comfortable enough with yourself to allow another person to do the same. But if you stay stuck at a certain point where you continue to avoid or look away from parts of you, it is unfair to expect someone else to pin down and embrace those parts of you, because you are not revealing them in a way that allows them to.
To let yourself be loved, reflect on what you conceal from the people closest to you. And then, you need to give yourself permission to let those parts of you roam free, to be seen by those that most want to see them, like the person trying to love you for everything that you are. And on the other side of letting someone in, you can experience a connection that obliterates anything you expected love to be. You can experience being fully seen. And when you get there, you will see that any expectation or projection you had on who your partner needs to be, or what they needed to have or be like, was merely another way to avoid love. A way to avoid having to face yourself fully. Because by continuously moving the goal post for the person opposite you, you merely postpone the point at which you need to meet yourself fully.
I admit that it’s a hard idea to accept: that increasingly high standards might be a cope for your own unwillingness to look at yourself. But it’s one worth considering, because in a time where options have never been more abundant, commitment has never been so scarce. And you have to eventually wonder: why is that? Why are we all so scared to let someone in? Why do we try so hard to resist the most natural direction where a real connection is trying to flow: deep, nurturing, true love?
When you show up as you are and are met with love and acceptance, expectation melts away and a transcendent feeling of being held transforms you. You realize that there never was anything to hide, that true love is not about loving someone despite their flaws, but about loving someone for everything that make them who they are—including what they are scared to admit is a part of them. Love is seeing someone fully, letting them see you fully, and wanting nothing more than to make the other person feel so deeply loved for all of the parts of them, especially the ones that they once hid from even themselves.
But to get there, you need to let someone in. You need to look at yourself, look at them, and let them see you fully. You need to let yourself be loved.
If you enjoyed this essay, will almost certainly enjoy this one, too. (Warning: it may fill you with warm and delightful feelings after reading).
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Yes I really agree that people reach a point where they can’t go any further in loving or being loved. My father is an amazing example; he had four wives. All of them lasted exactly nine years. Apparently that was his consistent limit, he could go that far and no farther.
It’s interesting people who marry many times...it shows they really hope for love...they keep trying even after multiple failures.
Witnessing this as a child and then a young adult in my father was a big part of my lifelong attempt to try to understand love and experience it, and write about it.
Reading this made me cry because of how wonderfully you described love. Thank you for your writing