Avoid Ambiguity in Loving

Love does not do well with ambiguity. You can, and must, have clear rules, boundaries, mutual responsibilities and expectations to make a love relationship work. Not knowing where you stand or are in a love relationship readily produces fear and anxiety. And these twin demons push you to distance and protect yourself from your loved one.

Ambiguity destabilizes love. Uncertainty about meanings, intentions and expectations breaks down a relationship. When you are lost in a relational wilderness, all you have for bearings are history and hope, the memories of where you have been with the other and the directional stirrings of where you want to be. Yet it takes two to set or to reestablish love’s course. It takes two to eliminate ambiguity.

One highly effective means of torture, designed to break down prisoners of war, and force them to confess most anything, is devilishly simple. Just change what is rewarded and what is punished, capriciously, seemingly randomly, so that one never knows what kind of a response to expect for behavior. The same behavior can be rewarded or punished. The prisoner becomes afraid to do anything; every action is a gamble, and the fickle rules of the game remain hidden.

I’ve known prisoners of love, locked in a dysfunctional relationship. To prosper, love requires a clear structure, mutually agreed upon, and constantly, consistently operative. Love needs a rock-solid structure as surely as the body requires an intact skeleton. Love is lawful; its rules are unchanging. Let all be fair in love and war, deny love its rules, and anarchy descends. Anarchy means literally, “against authority”; here it means to undermine love’s authority to establish and maintain itself.

People who refuse to abide by love’s rules, seek to manipulate and control, rather than to care and connect. Like medieval kings and queens, they think they are somehow above the law, that what they do is correct and unassailable, because they do it.

Most people enter marriage not knowing love’s rules or what to expect of themselves, the other or the relationship. Marriage is on-the-job-training conducted by trial and error. And life is at stake in this trial and error; one’s present and future existence will be permanently changed by the relationship.

As nations need treaties, love needs covenants. A covenant is a solemn agreement made binding by an oath. Covenants ground and generate rules for mutual life. Marriage is a covenant, which like a treaty, requires ongoing revision and interpretation. Persons are sovereign entities, just as nations. And human covenants, like treaties between nations, must be to mutual advantage. Nations or persons freely sign a binding agreement with the assurance that should it cease to be to their good, it can be terminated.

Relationships perish without a vision. And visions cannot be implemented without commitment. Commitment to another in love includes the commitment to work out the details of the relationship. That includes eradicating ambiguity. The only way to eradicate ambiguity is through communication: talk through expectations, talk through what things mean to each of you, talk through again and again the simple elements of your common life. Know not only your own mind, but the mind of the other.

Loving another includes the earnest striving to establish clarity, cleanness and consistency between you.