The Two Wrong Lessons About Love I Learned From My Father
From Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
“Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them — we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.”
We can only love others as much as we love ourselves.
In March of 2019, I was sobbing uncontrollably as I walked across Venice Beach. To any person passing at a distance, I looked like a guy taking a sunrise stroll near the surf, sipping coffee, sunglasses on, earbuds firmly plugged in. But if you had come closer, you would have seen tears streaming down my cheeks. I couldn’t stop them. I just kept crying.
Every time I repeated the word unlovable in my head, I would choke up. The fact that I felt unlovable made me so sad. But I wasn’t crying for me. I was crying for the poor guy who had gone his whole life not feeling lovable.
I cried for the kid who wanted to have and give love, to connect and be vulnerable, to commit and grow, but who didn’t have the skills to love, the courage to connect, or the ability to commit. I looked back at each failed relationship and saw someone who never put his heart on the line because he didn’t know how. Someone who could never give love because he hadn’t felt love for himself.
Looking back, it was clear what had happened — I had learned the wrong lessons about love from my father.
Lesson One
I learned my first wrong love lesson when I was five. I don’t remember learning the lesson. I was quite traumatized at that time. I have very little memory of that period in my life.
What I do remember is getting in lots of fights with friends, wetting my bed, and almost having to repeat the first grade. I remember my mother asking me if I wanted to be held back. I just didn’t know why she was asking me at the time. Apparently, among other acts of rebellion, I had refused to learn to read in the first grade.
Why was I so traumatized? My father had an affair and left my mother.
The details of what happened and why aren’t as important as what I learned from that experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn people reconcile, strengthen their relationships, and live happily ever after. Instead, I learned the people you love leave you.
Lesson Two
When I was fifteen, just as I was entering my dating life, I learned my second wrong lesson about love. Just as I was supposed to be building up my confidence and my faith that relationships work, my father left my mother again. Except this time, I remembered everything.
I remember my mother running around the house in a panic one night when my father hadn’t come home from work until the late hours. I thought this was strange since he rarely came home early. (Later I learned, he was coming home late all the time because of the affair).
I remember going to sleep to the sound of my mom weeping in the house. The sound of weeping still makes my body tense up.
And I remember my mother telling me I saved her from suicide. I don’t remember the actual conversation where I saved her from death but, apparently, she said she wanted to kill herself and I off-handedly repeated some after-school-special-type-quip I learned about suicide. “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Apparently, the quip was enough to snap her out of that train of thought.
Living through a parent's divorce isn’t pleasant in the best of circumstances. Hearing your mom crying and talking about suicide is even less pleasant. It makes a lasting impression on how you view love and relationships. The second lesson I learned is — when you leave someone, you devastate them.
So I made a conscious goal never to cheat on anyone. And never to hurt anyone like my mother had been hurt.
Perhaps I would have unlearned these harsh lessons if my parents had stayed together for the rest of my life. Instead, I used these two lessons to form the basis of my relationship strategies.
Five relationship strategies you should never use.
By the time I was sixteen, I was woefully unprepared for love. Not only was I afraid of being hurt, but I was also afraid of hurting someone. So, I developed perhaps the worst five dating strategies you could use if your intent was to have a lasting relationship.
1) The Friend Strategy. This is probably the best strategy of protecting yourself and the most useless for finding love. It worked like this: place yourself in some girl’s orbit and hope they notice you. It was a no-risk, no-reward strategy. It never ended in a date. Instead, it resulted in long-term friendships, mixed-signal conversations, and missed dating opportunities. While my heart was never broken, I did watch lots of people date the women I never had the courage to ask out.
2) Let-Them-Choose-You Strategy. A great way to avoid rejection was to let girls chase me. So I tended to date people who expressed interest in me first. This strategy worked well for dating in my teens and 20s when single women were all around me. It wasn’t as good a strategy for forming lasting connections, however, because I thought I could always find another relationship.
3) Doomed-From-the-Start Strategy. One strategy to protect myself from guilt over ending relationships was to date people where it would never work. This strategy involved dating people with emotional or psychological problems. These women tended to be very creative and exciting but also needed the support of a very patient, loving, and empathetic boyfriend. I was none of those things. However, I never felt guilty for ending the relationships. It wasn’t my fault. The problems absolved me from blame.
4) The Romance-Is-Gone Strategy. Unfortunately, this strategy was about saving me from hurt, not saving others. It’s the strategy I regret the most. It worked like this. Inevitably, the honeymoon phase of a relationship would end. That’s the moment when you stop being excited every second to be with the other person. This is when I would lose interest. But I was really just afraid to get more involved. Instead of going deeper and building a stronger relationship, I would end it and think, “I need to find someone where the honeymoon phase lasts forever.”
5) The Other-Guy Strategy. Being the “other guy” was a great way to avoid rejection or having a committed relationship. At the time, it made me feel good when I could persuade a woman to be with me when they were in a relationship. It felt like a conquest. However, it was really a no-lose strategy. If I didn’t succeed, it wasn’t a failure, and if I did persuade her, I was a genius. By the time I was in my 40s, half the women I had been with had been in a relationship at the time.
This strategy reached an inevitable moral dilemma. I met a woman I really liked. In a few weeks, she was about to get married. I wanted to be with her so much, I went forward anyway. But the whole time, I thought, “How can I ever trust her?” I needn’t have worried. Karma worked its magic. She dumped me.
In the end, these five relationship strategies didn’t save me from being hurt or hurting women. They only ensured I would never allow myself to be vulnerable enough to have a real, committed relationship.
Love yourself so you can love others.
By my 30s, I looked at my solo life and realized these strategies weren’t working. I made a conscious effort to do the opposite. I abandoned the useless Friend method. I no longer waited to be chased. Instead, I pursued people I liked. I stayed away from creative but emotionally unstable people. I went after well-adjusted women who were single. And I made a vow. After the honeymoon phase wears off, put the work in the relationship. Make it last.
But my efforts failed. I thought maybe pursuing people instead of some mutual, immediate attraction was the cause of the failure. I never realized the failure was because I didn’t love myself or that I couldn’t express love.
So on that fateful day in Venice Beach, I may have been crying a river. But I wasn’t sad for the person I was now or regretted the life I had led to that point. Yes, I felt sad for the poor fellow who learned the wrong lessons about love, felt compassion for the guy who had devised flawed strategies to save himself from pain, and wanted to hug the kid who never understood love so he couldn’t feel the love given to him or express his love to others. Even though I was crying, I wasn’t miserable. I now knew I wasn’t unlovable and that I could love.
If this were a movie, this story would end with me walking off the beach and meeting the love of my life while getting a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese. However, this is real life and I had actually already eaten that bagel, so I didn’t meet anyone after my epiphany. Nor in the weeks that followed. I also was ditching carbs, but that’s another story.
I still have work to do. As Brené Brown points out, building trust is a slow, step-by-step process, so you can be vulnerable with someone. Sharing my life in these articles is part of the process of opening myself up. The other part is being more open with my friends, which I constantly have to remind myself to do.
I’m making progress every day. That’s the best anyone can really do.
“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.”
— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
Kyle Crocco is the Chief Creative at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and the lead singer of the Santa Barbara power-pop band Duh Professors. He regularly publishes content about business thought leaders and personal growth on Medium, Business 2 Community, and Born 2 Invest.
