Loving Your Neighbor Is Not One-Size-Fits-All
How Knowing People's Preferences Helps Us Love Them Better
Almost immediately after posting Are You Guarding Your Heart Or Are You Just Scared? I matched with a guy on Hinge who I was actually excited about. We were on the same page about a lot of things—including the fact that we both value direct communication, even when it’s difficult. He shared with me that in the past, he has wished girls would just tell him on the first date if they’re not feeling it, instead of waiting to text him after.
I wasn’t expecting to have to do just that, but I did.
When we went on our first date, I knew pretty immediately that we weren’t a good fit for a multitude of reasons. Our plan was to get dinner and then go play mini golf, but when we got in the car after dinner, I told him that I wanted him to take me home.
It was a hard conversation but a gracious one, and he was disappointed but understanding. I reminded him that I had promised I would tell him if I wasn’t having a good time, and that this was me making good on my promise.
He may not have felt like that conversation was loving in the moment, but I certainly think it was. I had done what he asked me to do, and I was honest in the moment because part of loving people is listening to the instructions they’ve given you about how they want to be cared for.
Jesus’s Instruction for How to Love Others
I think there’s a strong, Biblical basis for this idea.
In Mark 12:30-31, Jesus says:
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.
Part of why it is so easy for us to love ourselves is because we know ourselves so deeply. We know what we like, what we don’t like, and how we distinguish between our preferences. So my initial (and very simplistic) take on Mark 12:30-31 is that loving your neighbor as yourself requires personal knowledge of your neighbor.
Sadly, the idea that we actually know our neighbors probably feels a bit foreign (at least in the U.S.). This is the sad but true reality of our time; we live in isolation while constantly being surrounded by other people. I will absolutely own up to this—since moving in with my parents in their new neighborhood, I think I’ve spoken to one, maybe two, of our neighbors. Yikes.
But this also begs the question: what does loving someone as you would love yourself mean from a Biblical perspective? How is it that Scripture uses this standard of “self-love” as guidance for how we should love others?
Love = Seeking Good
At its core, loving yourself means seeking your own good. This is something we don’t even have to think about; we just look out for ourselves this way. This also means that we “innately understand what it means to prosper and feel respected as persons” (Walker)1.
This understanding comes from God’s moral order—something that is built into us as his creation. The fact that we even possess our limited and broken understanding of God’s perfect morality is because of God’s grace.
So to keep it simple, loving ourselves means seeking our own good using knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of God. Then, loving your neighbor as yourself means seeking the good of your neighbor using knowledge of them and knowledge of God. So, the more you know about your neighbor, the more opportunity you have to love them with that knowledge, and I think that this “knowledge of others” idea has a lot to do with understanding other people’s preferences.
Knowledge of Others’ Preferences
Here’s what we’re not talking about when it comes to the idea of preference. Our culture has decided that loving people means agreeing to the following: “If you affirm me, I’ll affirm you” and “If you do not object to my preference, I won’t object to your preference” (Walker).
Our culture often uses the word “preference” to refer to things that are moral issues, but these are not the kind of preferences I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the preferences that make up our personalities, communication styles, and tendencies in relationships—these are the kinds of preferences that offer us an opportunity to demonstrate Christian love. By learning someone’s preferences and treating them accordingly, we can seek their good using the instructions they’ve given us for how to do so, as opposed to using the same “template” for loving others with everyone.
Let’s go back to my date as an example. This guy had shared with me that he values direct communication and that he had had experiences where he felt hurt by girls waiting to tell him after the date that they weren’t interested instead of just telling him on the date.
Because I knew that direct communication was his preference, I chose to tell him on the date that I wanted him to take me home because I wasn’t interested.
The fact that I also value direct communication just happened to be a bonus here. The point is that I wasn’t only acting based on my preferences; I was taking his preferences into account for how I handled the sensitive situation.
I’m not telling you this example to toot my own horn. I’m telling you this because after the date, these are the things I started thinking about and piecing together from my past experiences. It hurts when people we are in relationship with know our preferences and choose not to follow them. On the other hand, we feel seen and known when others are intentional about caring for us the way we’ve asked to be cared for.
We can never be perfect at doing this, but loving our neighbor as ourselves requires that we at least try. And thankfully, learning others’ preferences is subtle, not demanding. It happens when we have small, gracious conversations as things happen instead of letting frustration and hurt bottle up into resentment. It happens when we ask good questions and when we actually take note of how the other person answers. It happens when we make intentional efforts to use the information we’ve gathered to show people we are listening and paying attention, that we care about them, we know them, and we love them. This happens when we apologize when we get it wrong, when we accept feedback with humility, and when we have the courage to try and try again. After all, our inability to love others perfectly will never be permission to stop trying.
Big shout-out to Andrew T. Walker for writing “The Moral Meaning of Loving One’s Neighbor.” If you want to go deeper into this topic, read that! There’s a lot of nuance and theology that I wasn’t able to cover in this post, but he covers it wonderfully.