IT’S TEMPTING at times to wait for someone outside ourselves to bring meaning to our lives. For some people, their central longing seems to be for someone who really cares. Such people do not focus clearly on whether how they live is good for them and makes them happy. They pay less attention to how other people actually treat them than to pursuing that someone who will really love them.
The question to be asked is, “How would we ever know if someone really cared?” Wouldn’t it be better to be treated well by people who might not really care than to be treated badly by those who assured us that they did? We will never know for sure how others feel about us, but we can certainly tell how we are being treated.
Searching for certainty to be something to someone else limits our chance to become who we are to ourselves.
If we wait for someone to really love us, we may never learn how to love anyone else.