Love Me As I Am, Not As You Want Me To Be

Love me as I am, not as you want me to be. Because something breaks inside me every time you demand that it be in a certain way and every time you think that I should do things the way you would.

Something does not work when we do not accept ourselves as diverse and changeable. Something does not work when we immerse ourselves in our speech and stop paying attention to what others feel, think and experience.

In other words, the moment we neglect our empathic capacity, our relationships are restructured and symmetry disintegrate, thus creating power games through which, far from collaborating for well-being, we strive to achieve our interests.

Wings or limits: power games

We usually express a series of beliefs and relationship patterns about how couples should be. We assume and try to show that we collaborate with the person we love, that we take care of stability and coexistence as a couple.

Usually this individual capacity to cooperate for the good of the couple is ardently defended by the members. However, the truth is that many times this is unreal and certain power plays can be intuited.

In relationships many times we use energy, time and money to achieve something that, in reality, excludes the other person and generates an asymmetric relationship. In other words, we intend to rise up with the power that grants us to make the other do what we want. This inequality in the possession of power determines that the essence of their real demands are different. This is:

• Rosa wants Carlos to conform to what she wants in a non-confrontational way.
• Carlos wants something else but he has no power to change what is current.

Then two things happen:

• Rosa, in the crisis, sees her position of power threatened, which generates verbalizations of the type “Carlos is on his nerves, he drives things crazy, he is neurotic, etc”.
• Carlos, on the other hand, does not get out of his refusal and seeks, like Rosa, to get away with it and be right.

The importance of loving others as they are

We are people and, as such, we have lights and we have shadows. In reality this boils down to an adequacy of our expectations. We cannot expect others to always comply with our opinion or to drink the winds for us when it suits us. That is why it is important to expect everything from us and to put aside idealistic conceptions about our relationships.

What would be of us without plurality! If we weren’t universally unique, the world and therefore our personal exchanges would be very boring. Therefore, starting from that base, it is essential that we manage our expectations (this is important, because we cannot make them disappear in a radical way) and that we respect the people around us and whom we love.

If, on the contrary, we let them rule us, we will lose our essence and what makes us feel good. We will make “a copy and paste” , people without individuality or criteria who are left empty to cover what others need and forget what they want, yearn for and demand.

Main illustration by Benjamin Lacombe