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How I finally learnt to accept kindness
The focus on finding romance is so fierce that when I googled 'how to find love' it turned up over 5 and a half billion results.
As a single woman not interested in a romantic relationship in the conventional sense, I do still want love. I still want tiny gestures of intimacy and comfort and fondness and caring. To be known. Seen. Heard. It’s just that I want it outside of a couple. None of the top search results accounted for that.
Kate Bolick wrote in Spinster: Making A life of One’s Own that, ‘Having nobody to go home to at night had always seemed a sad and lonesome fate; now I saw that being forced to leave the house for human contact encourages a person to live more fully in the world.’ It is in my own singleness-by-choice that I have discovered she is right. Taylor Swift said that we don’t need a central romance to have a romantic life, and because I force myself to, I see that love is everywhere.
Love is in the friend who brought me a picnic for the long car journey as I moved house. As I turned off of a traffic-laden M1 to detour through Dunstable, I reached in to the bag marked “quiche” and found she’d had the baker cut it into small pieces that I could pick up with one hand. This is love, I thought.
Love is my father sneaking into my back yard as I worked to load up his car with all the squashed boxes from that move, the ones littering my path to the backdoor and driving me mad, and quietly taking them to the waste disposal yard. He insisted I stay where I was, at my computer, a deadline looming. This is love, I thought.
The woman who stops me as I browse furniture to say, ‘This is so embarrassing, but… are you Laura?’ and tells me she read something I wrote, that she likes my work, that it made a difference to her – love. That is love. Taking the time to be so generous with her praise is a loving act.
I suppose what I mean is kindness. Often, when we talk about kindness we talk about how important it is to give it. But love is the receiving of kindness. There’s two parts to the energy exchange. ‘Giving is virtuous, but so is accepting gifts gratefully’ said Doe Zantamata. The thing is, of course, that accepting kindness can feel so much more vulnerable than giving it.
A psychologist called Bowlby suggested that when we give or receive kindness, we stimulate the attachment system and all the emotions and experiences within it. If we’ve got negative experiences, we trigger those bad memories when the attachment system is stimulated. We have a negative bias against self-compassion, because we’ve been burned: through humiliation, abuse, neglect, thoughtlessness.
Being vulnerable enough to receive a loving acts terrifies us. Trauma makes us shun kindness. We can feel weak for accepting gestures of kindness, or undeserving. And that in itself is unkind, because the person extending the offer gets cut off at the knees. Think of the last time you gave a compliment and it was meant with, ‘Oh? This? It’s just H&M. Nothing special.’ Even a simple kind comment getting batted away with embarrassment can make the giver feel like they shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. The kinder thing is to receive the compliment, and say thank you – for you, and them.
There’s something in letting people be nice to us. Kind to us. Love us.
When our receiving capacity is jammed, we can’t be emotionally healthy. Do all the face yoga and injectables you want, but sunbeams will never shine from our faces without good thoughts, to bastardise what Roald Dahl said. For good thoughts, love has to flow freely, in both directions. We must give it, and we must humbly accept it. My friend Lucy actually says the words, “Thank you, I receive that” when she hears a kind word. It makes you want to give her more, because you know it is landing. Seeing her be so open to the kindness on offer makes me want to practice openness to it, too.
In the formula for 'how to find love', we so often don’t talk about receiving it. But saying thank you and accepting another’s kindness is human. It is what connects us. The energy runs both ways. I challenge you today not to give an act of kindness, but to humbly receive one, too. It feels good. It feels like love.
For more from Laura Jane Williams find her on Instagram.
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