Love Does Not Prevail Over Your Values
I have always believed that love prevails over all.
In my first marriage, I was married to a Persian woman. According to her family and culture, it was not meant to be and yet somehow we made it happen. Her parents had very high standards for the person she would marry and I can’t blame them. I have a little girl now and I too will have high standards for her.
Unfortunately, I could never meet their high standards. There were some things that were just not possible to change about myself, including the fact that I was not Persian. Nevertheless, I believed that in time, they would come to accept and even love me.
After a couple of years of marriage, no progress had been made with earning their acceptance. In fact, when she would be invited to visit her family, it was made very clear that I was not invited to join her on those trips.
While my love for her always provided fuel to believe I could one day win them over, it started to become clear that it may not happen. After all, I cannot control their choices. Truly, there was nothing I could do because the task of accepting me was fully their responsibility. No matter how hard I might try, the task remained theirs to accept me or not.
As I started to come to really consider the fact that there was nothing I could do, I wondered how much being a member of their family mattered to me.
I have one sibling, a sister and she was already married. Her husband is like a brother to me and to my father, he is like another son. When they got married, I was happy to have someone I could call a brother. Whenever he visited, he was treated just like anyone else in the family (for better and sometimes for worse, haha!). Nevertheless, he was 1000% family after they were married. When I thought of what my brother-in-law has with us, I knew that is what I wanted from my wife’s family. In other words, I did not just want a wife, I wanted her family as well.
Part of me thought that maybe this desire and value might not be so strong and I could possibly concede it. However, after careful and thoughtful reflection (plus a few attempts) I knew that I could not. This idea of family was too important to me, it was something I valued far too much to fully surrender. I simply could not see my life without this.
It was then that I knew that our marriage could not work. This was not an easy conclusion because I truly believed love conquered all. Given it was against her family’s wishes, simply marrying her required love to conquer just so that we could be together and we were. Naturally, this only reinforced my belief. So it was so difficult and painful to even consider that our love may not conquer this new challenge. I didn’t just love this woman, I was in love with her (for those who understand this distinction). We dreamt of raising a family together and the adventures we’d take our kids on one day.
Ultimately, we decided that this would not be able to work. This was probably one of the hardest decisions I had to make because for the first time in my life (at that point), I learned that love did not prevail over all.
What I learned was that love does not prevail over our values and perhaps that is for the best. How happy could I have really been if I had just ignored my values and persevered into building a partial-family with her? I knew then and still know now that compromising this one value would have caused irreparable damage to our relationship over time.
The lesson I want to share with you is this…
Sometimes, our love of something or someone can put us in a position to compromise our values. The power of love is real and beautiful and special. If you believe it can prevail over all and you put it to the test, you have probably already learned that it can prevail over a lot of things.
However, you need to be careful that it doesn’t prevail over your core values and desires – the values which matter to you the most. This is easier said than done. The battle between love and values is a massive one and there will be casualties. In my case, I had to say goodbye to a woman I loved so much so that I could leave space in my life to one day build the family I’ve always wanted. While it felt wrong to walk away from true love I also knew that I could now pursue my vision of a family. This didn’t make the break up and divorce any easier but it guaranteed that I could live with the decision.
Recently, I spoke with someone who shares similar values in family. In her case, she wants nothing more than to start her family and have kids. She’s in a relationship with someone who is coming out of a complicated marriage with kids. His kids are in their mid-to-late teens and he’s approaching fifty years of age. According to my friend, he’s not sure he wants to start a family again. She on the other hand is younger and certain about her desire to start a family as this is something she values deeply. Like me, she believes love can prevail over all and as I mentioned earlier, I still believe it prevails over most things. She is facing a situation of love versus her values and while I don’t know this man personally, I’m sure he’s experiencing a similar battle between his love of my friend versus his own desires and values at this stage of his life.
When it comes to our values, we know what we really want even if we don’t have the confidence to declare it boldly or follow through on it. If we looked deeply within, we would find that when it comes to our values, there is no doubt of what we want. In my case, my values for family made it clear that I wanted a marriage to lead to the union of two families. Love challenged me to question or reconsider that value but ultimately, my values won.
Why are values so important and costly to compromise?
Some reasons why values are so difficult to go against include:
Values define your sense of self. They are fundamental to your identity and as a result, any challenge or compromise of value is a challenge to who you really are. You might have experienced this when choosing a career for money over love of the work.
Values provide us with meaning and a framework for how to lead a purposeful life. When you go against your values, you also move away from meaning and purpose. This can cause us great pain and discomfort.
Values give us a sense of authenticity and when we challenge our authenticity we risk losing respect for ourselves.
Values help us to identify our priorities. When we go against our values, we deprioritize those things that are most important to us and that never feels good.
Choose Values over Love
Maybe it’s a career you love that is challenging your values. I once left a career I loved because the job asked me to compromise my values. You can read more about that story in my book (The Journey to Reinvention). I tried everything to stay longer and it started to cost me my mental health. I began to lose my passion for teaching and the person I was becoming in the classroom did not reflect who I really was. I wanted love to prevail however it did not and it was starting to lose badly against my values. In order to save the possibility of teaching again one day, I knew I had to leave before my love of teaching turned into hate. It sounds extreme, but with how significantly my values were being challenged it was not an exaggeration to say that I was starting to hate my teaching job.
When you pick love over your values, you run the very serious risk of leaving yourself behind.
Whenever faced with values versus love, choose your values. Your values are your most foundational building blocks. It’s never easy to walk away from love. However, it gives you the greatest chance of living an authentic, purposeful, and aligned life.
And maybe for love to have another chance to prevail in the future.
What are your thoughts, comments, questions, or concerns on this topic? Please let me know.