Dash of Sass: Are Your Facebook Posts Actually Driving Love Away?

Quotes of the Day:

Desperation and impatience twist our thinking and pull us into error and deception every time. ~Michelle McKinney Hammond

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it. ~Maya Angelou

While this may look loving, when we struggle with an idol of dependence, we’re in fact not loving people as much as we’re using them to fulfill our need to belong, be liked, and be desired. This explains why some friends and family members can be so demanding, smothering, and needy. It also explains why we’re so easily inflated by praise and deflated by criticism. It’s as if others have the ability to determine our identity for that day based on a word or even a glance. ~Mark Driscoll

The Single Woman Says:

I have this guy on my Facebook feed who I don’t know all that well but whose updates are like a daily sad, sad sonnet. According to him, his life is utterly depressing and miserable and unfair and difficult. He’s one of those people whose updates you don’t unsubscribe to because every update that pops up (and they pop up about every hour on the hour, every day, all day long) is like a cautionary tale of how NOT to treat Facebook status updates like therapy sessions and your FB friends like therapists. I don’t say all this to be insensitive, because my gut tells me his life isn’t really all that bad…but that he’s an attention seeker who uses social media as a big giant ego stroking device. And there is no one more exhausting than the Attention Seeker.

Except for the person who’s Too Needy For Love.

Yes, this guy also whines daily about his inability to find love. He seems to possess zero self-awareness about the tone of his daily posts. Every day there’s at least two or three updates about “I’m such a great guy. I have so much love to give. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I find love? Why am I always the one to get hurt? If the problem is me, please help me to see it!” and so on and so forth. And the answer is so obviously right in front of him that I’ve had to literally stop myself from responding with “Please go hold your Facebook stream up in front of a mirror and you will see the problem staring you in the face!” I don’t say this to criticize him because he wants or desires to find love…most single people do. I say this because he is clearly so needy and desperate and grabby and greedy for someone to come along and validate him and complete him and make him feel okay with himself and his life, he is literally repelling anyone away from him who would dare get close enough to try and love him. And that’s what happens, friends. When we have no sense of worth or confidence or fulfillment or happiness in and with our own lives, we start to look outward for something to come along and be the band-aid for our bleeding self-esteem. We label this process “searching for love.” Then when we finally do manage to find someone, likely just as needy as we are, to come into this unhealthy pattern and attempt to be our “everything” in order to make us feel whole and loved and okay with ourselves, it either becomes an even more desperate cycle of two desperate people looking to each other for things they should be looking to God for…or our neediness sends the other person running in the opposite direction. Wanting to find love because you want to share your life with someone is healthy, and normal, and even admirable. Desperately pursuing “love” because you are running from the fact that you haven’t yet learned how to love yourself and your life is a recipe for disaster. Even if Facebook dude were to find “love” right now, he is clearly not ready for it. How are you going to invite someone to join you in your life when YOU don’t even like being in your life? When you are desperate, insecure, needy, clingy, and panic-stricken about the idea of spending your life alone, you are NOT in a position to be choosing someone to spend it with. Anyone you attract from that dark and incomplete and lacking place will not be the person meant for you.

So what would my advice to Facebook dude be (if he asked me, which he hasn’t)? Stop moaning and groaning about how miserable and unhappy and loveless your life is and start figuring out what YOU need to do to get to a happy, healthy, loving place. Stop searching for love before you’ve even learned to love yourself. Stop endlessly seeking attention on FB and start asking yourself WHY you need that kind of attention. Stop publicly airing your dirty laundry on a daily basis to the world and start washing it, a piece at a time, until your mind and heart and FB stream is clean and clear and under control (to steal a line from Clean & Clear acne medication). The problem isn’t a lack of love in your life, the problem is a lack of love for YOURSELF in your life. If you’re not attracting the love you want, stop complaining about it and start DOING something about it! When you focus on taking care of yourself and fulfilling yourself and learning to love yourself…you have a lot better chance of attracting the love of your life than by sitting around complaining about everything. Being too needy and desperate for love actually drives healthy love away. So instead of being greedy for it – simply do all you can to get READY for it. When you live your life this way, even if love never comes along, you’ll be prepared for that, too. Remember, your life should be so fulfilled and purposeful and centered in God that you see it as the cake and love as the icing. With or without the icing, a cake is still a cake. And a mighty delicious one, at that!