Does Love Make You Weak?
The other day, I googled “does love make you weak” out of sheer interest in other people’s thoughts.
Growing up, the shows and movies I would watch would almost always have some character like Max in a Goofy Movie who would turn into a bumbling idiot whenever his crush Roxanne was around him. However, I also recall seeing love make characters do extraordinary things, like when Meg pushed Hercules out of the way of a falling pillar, resulting in her being crushed instead.
Both of these narratives push conflicting ideas, one being that “love makes you weak” and the other being “love makes you strong,” so I was curious to see what people believed.
As a result, I found forums with literally hundreds of responses to questions just like mine, quotes from characters in books I’d never heard of, and even an article about what love does to someone from a biological perspective. Clearly, this was a bigger question than I realized, and I was far from the only one who was searching for the answer.
The experiences and opinions I found were highly nuanced, with some conflicting views. Most people I came across stated that love was a “two-sided coin” where it could be a weakness or a strength depending on the circumstances. Those that believe love makes you weak said it’s because you are giving yourself to someone else, permitting them to do whatever they want with you while also becoming utterly dependent upon them. They say that by putting yourself in that position, you potentially experience pain that could be avoided. Very few answers I found actually stated that love makes us stronger. Those who did believe this often cited a mother’s love for her child, but that was about as far as they went.
I was surprised to see so few people saying that love made you strong. Of course, I thought love makes you strong; after all, God is the source of all love, and there is no way He makes us weak. So I wanted to know what happened to make them think love makes us weak. It’s true that today’s culture is so broken that many people probably haven’t experienced real, authentic love. What experiences did they have? How did love hurt them? This simple google search I did revealed that we live in a reality where people think that love is more of a detriment than a benefit.
I wanted to bring this up because love does not make anyone weak, but I think I get why someone might believe that it would. Love can’t make anyone weak, but some people may mistake what love does as weakness. If you or someone you know thinks love begets weakness, I highly encourage you to look over these few points here.
- Vulnerability is not a weakness.
When you give yourself to somebody, you can make yourself vulnerable, and if you make yourself vulnerable, you make yourself woundable. However, making yourself vulnerable is not a weakness. Becoming vulnerable with someone actually takes a massive amount of strength, but that love might not be reciprocated, and they may hurt you in the process. Even soldiers who enter battle fully prepared come back with some scars. The wounds you receive from love are a sign of strength and how much you have loved others.
- If you find yourself becoming a bumbling idiot around your crush, that’s attraction, not love.
Max wasn’t in love with Roxanne when he became a stumbling oaf, he was merely attracted to her. Attraction is also a good thing, but it isn’t love. Attraction is your mind and heart desiring to know more about someone they find fascinating. Love, on the other hand, is a complete giving of self to someone else. When you’re attracted to someone, you want to get to know them and impress them, but when you want to make such a good impression on someone, you get nervous because Heaven forbid you make a fool of yourself. Love gives you the strength to push past those nerves to perform feats you didn’t even know you were capable of.
- Love isn’t weakness, but it reveals weakness.
I think the person who explains this best is French Catholic Novelist Léon Bloy, as he once wrote: “Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.”
Bloy has a great understanding of what real, authentic love does to someone. When love first enters their heart, it starts by breaking down what previously took its rightful place. For a moment, the person feels weak because whatever they once relied on has just been shattered, and they feel this emptiness because they lost whatever was taking the place of their strength. This might be why some people think love makes them weak. Whatever someone was previously relying on, whether their looks, relationships, reputation, accomplishments, or whatnot, love reveals how fragile those things actually are. Love shows weakness and provides a strength greater than they ever knew was possible.
While we may live in a culture where many people view love as a weakness, that just isn’t the case. Love is the source of all strength, and it can reveal a lot of wounds someone never realized they had. I highly encourage anyone who reads this to examine how love made them stronger and what weaknesses love exposed for them.
