Love and War
You don’t love them if you aren’t willing to fight with them.
You heard me - you don’t love them if you aren’t willing to fight with them.
Full disclosure: I hate conflict. I’d rather juggle bowling balls on fire than tell someone something that’s bothering me. But I’ve learned in life that I can’t say I love someone if I’m not willing to bring issues to their attention.
In some areas of my life I’ve gotten significantly better at this. It’s a lot easier to start something new on the right track than to go back and change something that is already in place. Similarly, in areas where it isn’t relational but transactional I’ve gotten much better.
How curious it is, then, to think that my weakest areas of confrontation are with the people where it is most essential to real relationship?
My fear of confrontation has a very obvious origin story as it probably does for you. Being able to connect the dots as to how you came to be the way you are and allowing that past to dictate your future, however, are two different things. I can understand why I hate confrontation and still recognize that it doesn’t give me a free pass to avoid it.
In fact, if I cling to my desire to avoid it, I will cost myself real relationships and love.
When you walk through life with other people you will inevitably encounter areas where you disagree. There will be times you hurt them and they hurt you. In a loving relationship, those times require conversation. You will need to fight sometimes. And that’s okay. If you aren’t willing to fight, you’ll live in a cycle that requires you to constantly be avoiding or letting go of relationships because you weren’t brave enough to experience real vulnerability with them.
I’ve lost relationships from my own avoidance of conflict before. It doesn’t always happen overnight. For months I stayed in a friendship where I chose not to be honest about my own thoughts and feelings. I kept pushing them down and that avoidance of facing them led to a buildup of bitterness and resentment. Eventually it all burst (shocking, I know). I don’t have that friendship in my life anymore because instead of addressing those things as they arose, I allowed them to erode the relationship that existed.
Not every relationship is a forever one. That’s been a different lesson I’ve grappled with in my life. But avoiding the difficult parts of life isn’t a way to make it one. The relationships that endure time all require vulnerability and painful conversations. You don’t get to control who stays in your life forever, but one way to guarantee that person won’t is to choose not to have conflict. You can’t really love someone without it.
