We often confuse unity with sameness. Unity doesn’t require anything to be the same. Yet we’ve been taught that if we don’t agree, we are incompatible. We say things like, “If you love me, you’d see things my way,” and feel betrayed when our ideas align with those of the opposition.

My mom and dad divorced when I was eleven. I remember staying with my dad one night with my sisters during a weekend when he took care of us. During our nighttime prayers, my dad said something that stuck with me. He said that if we didn’t read our Bibles, he wouldn’t be able to support us. It stuck with me because this idea contradicted the unconditional love that I thought I was learning from the Bible. For the first time, I felt a condition. If I hadn’t shared his beliefs, I wasn’t sure if I would have received the same care. I never talked to him about it, but the idea truly hurt because it felt like there was a way that I could lose his love.

Most of our relationships are conditional and based on sameness. We can only date if we have things in common, join a community if there is mutual approval, and can only relate if we come to the same conclusions about the world. It’s important to realize that agreement and love aren’t the same thing. Agreement is 100% mental. It deals with facts, opinions, and interpretations. If you need these to love, you are loving with your head. To love with your heart is to be present, even when there is a disagreement. This is not to say that we should stay in toxic relationships. It’s to say that differences give us a chance to expand. It allows us to deepen our understanding of ourselves with the new information given from a different perspective. Closing off these connections means closing off the windows to ourselves.

We want love to be about agreements because agreements keep us safe. It’s quite a selfish requirement, because we want others to validate our views. We want to ensure that we’re all on the same page and that we don’t feel alone in our opinion. We have yet to realize how fragile building a relationship on agreement truly is when someone disagrees. It’s like the entire bridge from me to you collapses just because I have a different thought. At the end of any conflict, we wonder if we are still okay with each other. Do I still love you now that we hold different positions? I don’t believe love asks these questions because love doesn’t depend on mental alignment. Love is willing to remain even in cases of uncertainty. Presence alone is enough.

When we love someone who disagrees with us, we automatically infer that there is some fixing to do. We don’t truly love this person because we see them as broken, and it’s our job to steer them straight. Also, we are competing with others over our disagreements. We argue not to understand another person’s position, but to win the right to say I was right. True love says, “I can hold your difference without abandoning myself.” It’s possible to hold different truths at once because these truths aren’t truths at all. We’re just handing out our opinions and arguing about things that aren’t real. An agreement tries to resolve tension. Love includes the tension.

As a result of this need for sameness, most of us live with a lack of emotional integrity. Emotional integrity means the willingness to express one’s emotions, thoughts, and actions authentically, even when it is uncomfortable or risks conflict. This tends to happen when relationships prioritize a facade of peace over genuine connection. We unconsciously believe that our authentic self is a threat to the survival of a relationship. And so, we sacrifice our thoughts and feelings for a sense of security.

If we agree with someone all the time, we might realize that the person doesn’t love us for who we are, but for the person we pretend to be when agreeing. Even in a relationship, we can feel isolated and lonely because we are not allowed to express ourselves authentically. Agreeing with something we don’t agree with only breeds resentment. This resentment then erodes intimacy. When we withhold our truth, we are withholding parts of ourselves. There’s no way a relationship can last without the intimacy that comes with vulnerability. The agreement is hardly ever a true partnership, but one that submits to the other.

We don’t need to endorse another person’s belief to love them. Instead, we can easily look at another person’s actions and say, “This isn’t for me.” We don’t have to condemn other people for doing things that we wouldn’t do either. True love has nothing to do with approval or permission. I couldn’t care less if you approve of what I do, or what’s being written. What you do means nothing to me. To believe that you need to give this to another person strips the autonomy of the person and puts you in a place of superiority. How is this love?

The dichotomy of agreement and disagreement also gives a fickle meaning to a relationship that can easily be broken because we don’t share the same opinions. Connections mean agreement, and disconnection means disagreement. Under this rule, we pretend to agree to keep the peace or fight to convince the other person that they are wrong. There’s no middle ground. What if the third option were to hold the connection without the need to control the other person’s experience? Why can we not have differing opinions and still relate?

Proximity has nothing to do with love either. We can still love someone even if we don’t find ourselves close to them. Just because we need to distance ourselves from some people doesn’t mean we can’t love them from afar. You can love a person while leaving them.

I’m sure you’re now very confused about what love is because we weren’t taught this type of love. The definition of love is quite simple. Love is the absence of rejection. Love is the acceptance of all things, including the things we dislike or disagree with. We’ve been building up to this definition thus far, so I hope we don’t forget it. Love isn’t the romantic comedy where we are swept off our feet by a Prince Charming caricature. It isn’t sameness and tribalism. Love is the inclusion of all things, regardless of our opinion of all things.

Questions and Responses