Present Over Perfect

and his attentiveness. It sounded amazing.
And then he told me the next part of the story, which is
that he became so deeply skilled at making people feel
loved in an instant, and along the way he lost the ability to
demonstrate actual, real love to the woman and the children
who were waiting at home. Making someone feel loved in
an instant is so much easier than showing someone your
love over and over, day in and day out. He had become a
master at quick, intense, emotional connection, and with
each experience of it, he found himself less able to connect
in the daily, trudging, one-after-the-other kinds of ways.
He is alone now, not living with the woman who was his
wife, not living with his children. That quick love cost him
enduring love, and it wasn’t worth it.
This is a common story, isn’t it? The pastor loves to
solve other people’s problems, but doesn’t come home with
enough energy in the tank for his family’s everyday
problems. The writer becomes addicted to the IV drip of
blog comments and likes, while her family longs for her to
close the laptop and look them in the eye. It’s easy to be
more charming in a sales meeting than at witching hour, and
it’s nice to feel competent at something when family life
feels difficult at best. By “nice,” I mean addictive.
So many of us have taken those steps, if we’re honest,
because we don’t know how to fix the problems we’ve
created, because we never learned the set of skills we
needed to navigate such difficult intimacy. We dive into
information or work or bicycling or whatever, because it