More On The Ache To Be Loved

I asked God a question this week that I’ve spent most of my life too afraid to ask directly.

Not the polite version. The bare question underneath all the others: Why do I ache to be loved, and what am I supposed to do with an ache that mostly goes unmet?

I’ve circled this question for years… in part because it felt dangerous to name.

I’ve talked in a recent post about how I used to look through other people’s windows.. I suppose this is a “part 2” to that post. There’s a sort of shame that attaches to admitting you long to be loved as though wanting it reveals some deficiency, some failure to be self-sufficient, some embarrassing neediness that a mature woman, a woman of faith, should have outgrown by now. So I kept it quiet. I let it leak out sideways instead, into the wrong rooms and the wrong relationships, which is its own kind of confession about what unspoken longing does when you refuse to look at it directly.

But this week I asked it plainly to God. And the answer I kept arriving at reorganized something I’d had backwards for a long time.

The first thing I had to unlearn is the assumption that the ache itself is a flaw. A sin to repent of, or at minimum a weakness to overcome through sufficient faith.

It isn’t. The longing was put in me. I was made in the image of a God who is Himself relational. Father, Son, and Spirit, an eternal community of self-giving love that existed before anything else existed. Before creation, before time, there was already love being given and received within God’s own being. To be made in that image is to be made for the same thing: to give and receive love, to be known, to belong.

And then there’s the detail in Genesis I’d somehow read past a thousand times.

In a sinless paradise, with everything called good, the one thing God named not good was the man being alone (Genesis 2:18). Not alone in the absence of God…..God was right there. Alone in the absence of another human being woven into his life. The ache for that kind of belonging predates the fall. It isn’t a symptom of brokenness. It’s a feature of design, present in Eden before anything went wrong.

So the longing to be known, to have someone on my side, to belong at a table……that is not neediness to be ashamed of. It might be the part of me that most resembles God. That reframing alone undid something. I’d been treating holy ground as though it were a wound.

I’d been quietly assuming my ache was a version of the longing for motherhood.

The maternal instinct redirected, the same hunger pointed at a different object. But I think now it’s deeper than that.

The longing for motherhood is one expression of a more fundamental longing. The root desire to give and receive love, to be bound to someone whose life is woven into mine. My ache isn’t motherhood-longing in disguise. It’s the root itself, the primary human longing of which both marriage and motherhood are particular forms.

This matters more than it might seem, because it means the ache is not identical to “I must have a husband.” I’d collapsed it into that. Decided the longing could only be satisfied by one specific arrangement, one ring, one man, one configuration. But the actual ache underneath is I must be loved and known and belong, and that can be met in more forms than the single one I’d fixated on. Many of the saints were unmarried and childless and still deeply loved, still known, still living full lives. The ache is more fundamental than any one way of meeting it….which means fixating on the one way I’d decided it had to come was itself a kind of error.

Then comes the hardest part of what I asked: Is there a purpose in not having it met? Should I just learn contentment in God’s love alone?

There’s an easy answer to this, and I’ve heard it my whole life. God is enough, so if your faith were strong enough, the human longing would evaporate. It sounds spiritual. It’s the kind of thing people say to sound good in a sermon.

It’s also not biblical, and handed over cheaply, it does real damage.

Because the saints didn’t stop aching. Paul, as content in Christ as anyone has ever been, still longed for the churches, wept over them, asked people to come to him, felt the absence of friends like a physical lack (2 Timothy 4:9-11). David, a man after God’s own heart, cried out of a loneliness so profound it bleeds through the Psalms. And Christ Himself.…fully God, lacking nothing…..wanted His friends awake with Him in Gethsemane, and felt their sleeping as a kind of abandonment (Matthew 26:40). If anyone could have been sufficient in God alone, in the most literal sense, it was the Son of God. And He still wanted His friends near. He still felt their absence as loss.

So “be content in God alone” has never meant “no longer feel the ache for human love.” The mature saints didn’t achieve the elimination of longing. They learned something harder and more honest: to hold the ache without being ruled by it. To let it coexist with a deeper settledness rather than demanding it be either instantly satisfied or entirely erased.

So the answer to “should I even acknowledge the longing, or just press past it into contentment” turns out to be both….and in that order.

I have to see it first. Name it, honor it, bring it to God honestly rather than pretending a holy woman shouldn’t feel such things. Because suppressed longing does not quietly transform into contentment. Suppressed longing becomes resentment, or it leaks out sideways into the wrong people and the wrong rooms. Relationships that, platonic or otherwise, that goes nowhere good. They were the ache, denied a front door, finding the windows. Longing has to be seen and owned before it can be rightly ordered. You cannot rightly order something you refuse to look at.

And then, after seeing it, the work is to let God’s love become the floor.

Not the replacement for human love. The floor underneath it. The thing that holds when human love is absent, so that I’m not destroyed by the ache even while I still feel it.

This is the distinction I keep wanting to blur and have to keep redrawing: not contentment instead of the longing. Contentment underneath it, holding it. Paul said he had learned to be content in any circumstance (Philippians 4:11-12), but “content” there doesn’t mean he stopped wanting things or feeling lack. It means he had a foundation that held regardless of whether the wanting was satisfied. The floor was solid even when the room was empty.

There’s one more piece, and it’s the one I most have to guard against, because it wears the costume of faith.

It’s the pious assumption that says: God is withholding love from you for a reason, so accept the lack as His permanent will. It sounds like surrender. It sounds spiritually advanced. But it can curdle into a resignation that isn’t faith at all. It’s despair wearing faith’s clothes.

The truth is more careful than that. Sometimes a season of lack is purposeful. Lack can drive you to God in a way abundance never could. It can refine what you actually want, strip away the counterfeits, keep you from settling for something that would have hollowed you out. I can see, looking back, that this season’s lack has done exactly that in protecting me in ways that would have cost me more than the loneliness ever did.

But there’s a vast difference between this season’s lack having purpose and concluding that lack is my permanent assignment. I don’t know that it’s permanent. It isn’t knowable. And to assume the worst and call it acceptance is not faith. It’s hopelessness dressed up to look holy.

So the honest posture is to hold it as not yet, rather than never. There may be real purpose in this season’s lack: refinement, dependence, protection. I can hold that as true without deciding God has sentenced me to a lifetime of the ache unmet. Not yet is a posture of faith. Never is a verdict I have no authority to render.

Where this leaves me is somewhere more honest than either the suppression or the false contentment I’d been alternating between.

I get to want it. The wanting is holy, an echo of the God who made me relational because He is Himself relational. I don’t have to repent of the ache or pretend a stronger faith would dissolve it. The saints ached. Christ ached. I’m in defensible company.

And I get to let God be enough in the not-yet, which is a different thing entirely from pretending I don’t want the yet. God as the floor, not God as the substitute. The settledness underneath that holds when the room is empty, while still leaving the door unlocked, still holding the longing as a live and honest hope rather than a closed and grieving case.

Jesus told the disciples that everyone who has left houses or family for His sake would receive a hundredfold, and in the same breath, “with persecutions” (Mark 10:29-30). Even the promise of abundant belonging came braided with the acknowledgment of hardship. He never pretended the cost wasn’t real. He just refused to let the cost be the final word.

That’s the posture I’m learning.

The ache is real. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I’m holding it in the open, in front of God, naming it as the holy thing it is and letting His love be the ground beneath it, solid enough to stand on whether or not the longing is met in this life.

Not contentment instead of the ache. Contentment underneath it. Seen first, then held. Not yet, never never. And the God who called my aloneness not good in the garden is the same God holding the not-yet now.

Which tells me the wanting was never the problem, and was never something He intended me to face alone.