Demands in a relationship called Love

It’s a basic teaching in peacemaking that we all have desires, and even good desires can blur into demands.  Demands kill love.  Demands turn the desire, good or not-so-good, into an attitude of judgment, which quickly translates into behaviours of punishment.

Punishment and love don’t belong in the same sentence.  Accountability and love do, but not punishment.

Oh the subtleties between punishment and accountability.

Punishment cares for only itself and what IT wants.  Accountability is about the success of a partnership.  Punishment says, “You must do it MY way.”  Accountability says, “We live here, and we coexist by the same rules.”

Can a person demand to be loved?  No, love can only be offered freely.  But if a person chooses to demand something instead of loving, they take away the freedom of the other in the relationship.

Demands kill love, yet the opportunity of repentance restores what would’ve been annulled.

The genuine love that’s exemplified in the beauty of relationship is that freedom that lives along a continuum of acceptance where judgment and condemnation don’t get a run.

Yet so many relationships are defined by a pattern of demand.  I’m not talking about the idea of occasional demand where in our human frailty we falter in our occasional neediness.

This concept of demand as a lifestyle is in the frame.

When a thing must be done, a certain way, within a certain timeframe or, worse, when you’re required to be a certain person or hold to certain attitudes or approaches.  When you’re not doing anything right, or when you seem to get everything wrong.  When you’ve not got enough or are never enough.

The list goes on.  Demand is a hell of a task master.  It’s never satisfied.  And demand makes a misery of a relationship because demand is a miserable companion.

Demand must be expunged from relationship.  It’s a cancer that needs to be dug out at its core.  What life is breathed into a relationship when a person who’s resorted to demand decides of their own accord that they’ve missed the mark—oh, yes, it happens!

Sometimes it’s about a gentle though firm challenge, “Do you realise that you’re demanding in what (and the way) you’re requiring from me?”

Any relationship that can speak such truth and where it can be heard and pondered is a relationship seriously worth working for.  But for the person who cannot bear to be confronted with the possibility that they’re not perfect it’s affrontery.

Demands will sink every relationship, sooner or later.   If we cherish our relationships, we’ll genuinely venture into the opportunity to do an audit: “Am I demanding or is my partner demanding?  Every time I’m demanding I damage the cause of love and am not building the relationship, but slowly eroding it.”