Well I have a son now, and I’m afraid you’ll be hearing a lot more about him. Tying into last week’s column, I have been thinking a lot about love.

I love my wife, and I never thought I could love something as much as I do her and James, and that experience of love has challenged me. Think about two aspects of love with me—it applies to your business too.

We Are Meant to Be Burdensome

I think too often we assume that loving someone is giving them a wide berth, staying out of their way, not asking too much of them, not upsetting them. 

But love is dead without relationship, and relationships don’t exist without some transfer of indebtedness. 

One of my best friends and I do lunch every Friday and often I’ll buy, or he’ll buy, and we understand that at the next opportunity, we will seek to balance the scales back out. But if not, hey, that’s a small price to pay for our friendship!

(If I ended up paying every week I would start to look for a new lunch buddy, after all!)

My best friends are those who don’t feel bad asking for things. They ask to borrow things, they call me and spend an hour decompressing, presuming upon my time. But I welcome that. (Again, if they called daily for an hour, I would start responding with solutions, referring them to a psychiatrist or something!)

But that’s how love works. 

My most fragile relationships are ones where people walk on egg-shells around me and assume I’m “too busy” to help them, putting up a wall between us. I can tell they don’t want to let me in, and they certainly don’t want to be in my debt. 

That’s not how love works.

If we truly love each other, we will see how life is meant to be lived together, and “together” means exactly that—bearing each other’s burdens., whether that be warming up a bottle at midnight or completing someone else’s task.

Love is An Action, Not a Feeling

We’ve all heard this before, but imagine it in context of having a child. You can say “I love you” to that child over and over as they babble and giggle in your arms, but it will fall totally flat if you refuse to get up in the wee hours of the morning to feed them.

Same goes for your spouse, and your coworkers, employees, and other relationships.

Actions speak a heck of a lot louder than words, and it’s easy to fake words but you can’t fake actions. 

That’s why it’s important what others say about you, not what you say about yourself. 

We believe our own press, but love is real, and it’s often involving a lot of spit-up, poopie-diapers, or painful spreadsheets, tasks, and mundane paperwork.

If we say we love each other but don’t look out for each other’s best interest, what’s the point?

The meaningful life is lived in community, in relationship with others, and relationships are worthless without true love. 

If you need to open up and let yourself become indebted to others in order to strengthen the relationship, do it. If you need to start living up to your words and love with your hands, not just your mouth, do it. 

My son, James, will be very proud of you, I have no doubt.

I surely want to make him proud.