LOVE WITHOUT CLINGING

Love without clinging
Cry if you must
But privately cry
The heart will adjust...

These are words from a profound poem by Ruth Bell Graham the wife of the world’s great evangelist Billy Graham. How often do some married people become very clingy and what you could call addictively dependent on their spouses. Well clingy love is very suffocating. It’s distressing and usually unreasonably demanding. People, who are clingy like this, usually are quite insecure and are dependent on their spouses for emotional strength and so on. They need their spouses to find meaning. They need them for approval. They need to hold on to them so tightly to feel their life is making a head way. They are very possessive. In short they are just needy people! Needy people make a relationship a drain. Unknown to them they put undue pressure on the relationship until the relationship caves in. Most often these clingy people define their need as love but love is not clingy and demanding. Love is rather giving! Love is giving meaning to our spouses and relationships. It adds or multiplies and doesn’t subtract or divide.

Unfortunately, many come into their marital relationships with faulty concepts that the relationship is all about them and is to ‘satisfy’ just them. In a way it could be true when placed in the proper perspective. Unfortunately, clingy lovers oftentimes don’t put their spouses into consideration and in the right perspective when making their emotional demands. A good marriage does satisfy but only on the premise that you have made investments into the relationship and as such you begin to enjoy yielded dividends that satisfy you. The primary thing is not to draw from the first day. Rather a good relationship is built on years of personal investing of time, ability, creativity, emotional support and love. When that’s done over the years then one can relax to enjoy the unprecedented dividends that accrue.

The question is this, what can we do to enjoy loving and being loved without becoming clingy and suffocating? It is said that if something is yours, lovingly let it go and surely it will come back to you. Sometimes clingy people are fearful people. The sad thing about such fear is that usually what they fear befalls them. When you are fearful that your spouse may leave they probably may, eventually, because unknown to you, you display certain attitudes and actions that either give you away and offends your partner who reads your actions as DISTRUST or you become a total put-off to your spouse who begins to feel unnecessarily pressured in the relationship.

BECOME A GIVER
One of the greatest things you could do in your relationship is see that you are a giver. Bob Marley quoted the scriptures when he sang “Blessed is the hand that giveth than the one that taketh”. What a true statement. To avoid becoming clingy and snuff out the life in your relationship, you need to position yourself as a giver. Of course there are those who take advantage of others and their kindness. That cannot be overlooked but there is a cord of truth that runs through the reins of life. You cannot do anything against the truth only for the truth. The power of giving cannot be overcome by a selfish recipient. When you are a life giver, you open yourself up for blessing and peace that cannot be quantified. Life in general is a risk. Marriage of course is a risk. We step into it with hope that it will work out. For it to work out there are principles we need to abide by and giving is one cardinal and fundamental principle that must of necessity be in place.



LOVE YOURSELF
You cannot give what you don’t have. Everyone who is clingy in their relationship is obviously devoid of self-love. Self-love could also become dangerous when it becomes self-centredness or selfishness and that is certainly not what I’m talking about here. Self-love here simply means learning the art of appreciating yourself for who you have been created by God to be, giving to yourself, pampering yourself when the need arises and getting to a point where you invest love into yourself such that it overflows into loving others and not being too needy about others loving you. It also gets to the point where you understand the art of loving others out of the fullness of the love you have for yourself and receiving love in return, graciously, when it is given.

RELEASE YOUR SPOUSE
Holding on too tight could be quite suffocating you know? Let your spouse go. In fact release your spouse on the wings of trust and faith. Trust many times is taken for granted by selfish and myopic individuals but the greatest anyone can give their spouses and themselves as well is the gift of release. It simply says “I love you enough to trust you not to hurt me but am not going to make you not hurt me. I f you don’t hurt me it is because you chose and love me enough not to!”. Big risk someone might say but best way to live y’all!

FIND YOUR ESSENCE
Nobody is born empty. Nobody is born to be totally dependent on anyone. We do need each other in what science calls a symbiotic relationship but not parasitic. Find the essence you have been born with and release it. Understand your uniqueness and ‘flaunt’ it. I use the word flaunt with caution. Someone may understand it as lewdness but I mean find your essence, that unique thing that makes you who you are. That core thing that is uniquely yours and maximize it. For some it’s their persona, for others it’s their intelligentsia, while for others it’s their warmth, for another its their ability to be strong and for others it’s their hearty nature. The list could go on and on but you just find what your essence is and touch your world, your environment, your family and especially your spouse. That way you will not be clingy rather you will have so much to give. One thing I have discovered is that everyone born of a woman has a lot of love to give. Its hidden way inside each of us but we need to understand how to let it flow.

On a final note, why be clingy? Excuse me; you have got so much love to give. If you don’t give it fully on this side of eternity, please what would you do with it in the grave? Reach out and touch! Be a giver and let’s make our world a better place!!

This is where I draw the curtains till next edition. Remember PRAYER CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!

Hello! Its me Remember

Hello!  It’s Me Remember?

Many times in my life, after some years I come across someone who happened to be a friend in primary school or somewhere down the line in my life and we probably meet at the airport, or mall or market or shop and the person comes excitedly to greet sometimes calls me by my name and am running through my mental database to remember who it is.  Don’t know about you but I often smile through the whole scene of course with some pain at the back of my ears but leave feeling totally ashamed of myself for not remembering.  Sometimes the person has details and is here reminding me of how we used to do this and that in those days.  It’s more like hearing the person’s heart saying ‘Hello!  It’s me remember? Hmph!

This scenario just puts succinctly my thoughts today about marriage and married people.  I once read the story of a young couple who were in love, got married, had lots of kids, got busy raising the kids until the nest was empty.  Then one morning the man and woman wake up and take a look at each other and couldn’t recognize themselves and headed straight for the divorce courts.  Tell you what, they lost contact with each other years ago.  The couple found out that all those years all they were doing was working to create a home for the kids and raise them, project a good face in the community but never had enough time to invest in each other.  I guess one of them would have been saying to the other ‘Hello, It’s me Remember?’  The other was probably squinting and trying to!

How important is it to invest in each other?  How important is it that we add value to our relationship and also to each other?  I think it’s absolutely important.  Except in a case of emotional and psychological dysfunction, the heart of every homo sapien usually gravitates towards the direction of positive influence and investment.  You find that we all cherish someone who makes a positive addition to our lives.  I find that the words of those who are closest to me, make more impact than that of those who are not.    The word of a spouse is more hurting or strengthening than that of any other person in the world.  You may call a man anything outside and he may not be perturbed but when it comes from his wife, it cuts through the heart like a sword and vice versa.

Gets me thinking that if only people can remember that the person we are married to is not perfect just like we are not and rather than tear down begin to add value to them with our words and attitudes then many years down the line we will be remembered.  You know why?  The person that blossoms becomes a product of your own making.  In counselling many times I tell the couples that if a man becomes great after he marries a woman, she’s done her job well and vice versa.  Your assignment in marriage is not to be a taker or the receiver but to add value to the life of the person you have joined your life with.  The hand that gives is far more blessed than the one that takes.  Your assignment is to help bring out the best in the person.   It is usually small minded, myopic thinkers that focus more on what they can gain from the person they are married to.

A complete failure of a man can become the President of a group of companies if only he has a wife that adds value to him.  She doesn’t allow him wallow in his present circumstances, she doesn’t compare him with other men, doesn’t make undue demands that put him under unnecessary pressure or push him further to think he is a failure and can never become anything in life.  She helps him with her attitudes and words.  In like manner a man can turn a sloppy wife into a princess and the quintessence of his delight when he rather than pecks at her, teaches her, guides her, covers her and gently shows her. 

Hey, no sane person forgets the person that invests in them.  Recently I went to the salon to wash my hair and the young man asked if I wasn’t going to fix my weave on and I said yes but I was going to have some other person fix it for me just to ‘encourage’ him in his trade.  I was touched when this young man said to me ‘Ma’am you are right, we really need encouragement’.  Everybody needs someone to encourage them.  Every man and woman needs someone to speak positively into their lives.  We all want someone who believes in us.  We all want someone who will stand when we are all broken, torn up and crumbling inside.  We all need someone who will say you can when everything in you says you cannot.

Hello!  It’s me Remember?  Don’t let your spouse feed from outside.  Don’t let them look for encouragements from the lips of another person.  Don’t let them sleep on the same bed with you and wake up in the morning thinking of whom they will talk with over their heart issues.  Don’t be there and yet really not there for them.  Don’t let them feel obligated but not appreciated.  Yes marriage is an obligation but it can move beyond being an obligation to being a delight.  It comes by all of us choosing to add value to the lives of the ones we love. HELLO! IT’S ME REMEMBER?

Guess this is it, till next time, never forget that PRAYER CHANGES EVERYTHING!