. . . and the greatest of these is love.

Back when I was first launched into my lesbian adolescence, and I found myself doing relationships with women for the first time, I was much perplexed by a series of relationships which didn’t work. I realised I had been working on the assumption that we were all wanting the same things from a relationship, or had the same core values – I mean, after all, we were all lesbians, right?

My core values have always been about love. When I became a born-again christian in the ‘70s, the bible verses that adorned the walls of my bedroom were all the love ones:

1 John 4:7-8 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
v18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

I always thought it was obvious that what christianity was all about was love – it says it right there – God is love. It wasn’t until long afterwards, as I tried to come to grips with the heartache and exploitation I experienced in the pentecostal cults to which I belonged for 20 years, that I began to understand that other people saw different core values in christianity – for some it was power, for some it was righteousness (especially an assurance of their own righteousness), for some it was certainty in an increasingly uncertain world, the list could go on and on.

I brought this same assumption to my relationships – that it’s all about loving and being loved, intimacy, connectedness, honesty, being real, being known. But again I had to confront the fact that people want very different things out of relationships. Some want safety – and feel that can only come from not being known. Some value independence and autonomy, and think that preserving those can only come at the price of eschewing true intimacy. Some just want peace, and that means never dealing with issues. Some don’t know what they want – but expect their partner to figure it out anyway!

Love, of course, means different things to different people. You only have to listen to the discourse about “tough love” currently in vogue in the christian right to realise that one person’s ‘love’ is another person’s judgemental, prescriptive oppression. Jesus gave a very great insight when he said, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” But even that presupposes that everyone needs to be treated in the same way. I think what we need to do is get to know the ‘others’ well enough that we understand how they would like to be treated – to find out their core values, and honour them as much as we can without doing violence to ourselves. All of this of course requires a lot of hard work – both to understand ourselves, examine our core values, and realise that they are not self-evident to everyone; and also to really listen to other people, and respect their values even when they are not ones we can find much sympathy for (imagine such a dialogue between the christian right and the queer community for example, or between feminists and fundamentalist Islam).

This is particularly true in the arena of intimate relationships. I came into lesbianism assuming that it was all about freeing ourselves from gender stereotypes and having relationships based on equality, reciprocity, mutuality. However, for some people same-sex relationships can also be about the possibility of inhabiting a different gender role than the one society prescribes for them. A woman, for example, might be drawn to the idea of inhabiting the male role in her relationship with another woman – whether she sees that as dominance, or as providing and protecting. I experienced something of the power of that when I first came out, and found myself being the pursuer instead of the pursued, a ‘husband’ rather than a ‘wife’. For me (I’m not saying for everyone) that marked a transition from a contingent to an autonomous subjectivity – really awesome stuff. Political dykes might be horrified by such an arrangement, but then run the risk of being as judgemental and prescriptive as the society we are seeking to remake. Love might be allowing ourselves to be honest and vulnerable with our partner, allowing her to see our fears and inadequacies. Or it might be keeping those things to ourselves so that our partner has someone strong to lean on. Both might be honest expressions of love – or manipulative, even abusive behaviours.

I suspect many relationships come to grief because of incongruent core values. Not to mention that sometimes our core values may change – which is why a fundamentalist, evangelical pastor’s wife can end up as a lesbian feminist baby sociologist. Ain’t life grand?!