The Love We Long For
It feels off, often.
A few years ago, I was sitting in a café watching the lunchtime crowd. The place was full. Every table was taken. Conversations rose and fell in every corner of the room. Two colleagues sat together but spent most of their time looking at their phones. A young couple seemed more tired than affectionate. A man in a suit ate alone, occasionally glancing at the door as if expecting someone who never arrived.
Perhaps that is one of the peculiar experiences of life in the city.
Life in the city, like this café can be crowded, but it does not feel full.
We are surrounded by people and yet often carry a quiet sense of distance from one another. We know many people, but belong deeply to very few. We are connected, networked, reachable at any hour, and yet many of us still carry the ache of loneliness.
The ache is not merely for company. It is for something deeper. It is the longing to be known and welcomed without having to earn it.
Most of us have learned to think of love as a kind of exchange. We do not do this consciously. The city simply trains us to think this way. Our work is measured by performance. Our relationships are shaped by availability and convenience. We become accustomed to asking, often without realising it: What do I get in return? And it feels off!
This logic slowly seeps into our friendships and families. We give carefully. We protect ourselves. We keep a little in reserve. After all, disappointment is familiar.
Most of us know what it is to be forgotten, overlooked, betrayed, or left behind. We know what it is to discover that a relationship we thought was secure was, in fact, conditional.
Yet something within us refuses to settle. We still hope for a love that remains.
And because we have been hurt, we learn caution.
We lower our expectations. We stop asking for too much. We tell ourselves that this is simply adulthood.
We still find ourselves drawn to stories of loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness because they awaken something we thought we had outgrown. Perhaps that longing tells us something important about ourselves. Perhaps we were made for a kind of love that is more than a transaction.
On the night he was betrayed, knowing that one of his closest companions was about to hand him over, Jesus knelt and washed his feet. It is a strange image.
Most of us would withdraw our affection. We would protect ourselves. We would preserve our dignity. Jesus does none of these things. He offers kindness even to the one who will wound him. It is difficult to know what to do with a scene like that. It suggests that love can be something more than a response to what we receive from others. It can be an expression of who we are.
The love embodied by Jesus is not naïve. It does not deny betrayal or ignore pain. It simply refuses to allow disappointment to have the final word.
And perhaps this is also why people are so often disappointed with Christians.
Christians have not always loved like this. We can be just as transactional, guarded, and self-protective as everyone else. Sometimes we have failed to embody the very love we speak about, and the disappointment people feel is real.
Yet perhaps that disappointment points beyond us. Because two thousand years later, people remain fascinated by Jesus himself.
Jesus seems to know something about being human that we all keep forgetting,
and perhaps we need to look to him afresh.
Perhaps we need help acknowledging that our deepest need is not to protect ourselves but to belong. That the good life is not found in becoming increasingly self-sufficient but in learning to give and receive love. That we become smaller when we close ourselves off from others, and more fully alive when we learn to make room for one another.
This kind of love is demanding because it asks us to resist the cynicism that often feels so reasonable. But it is also strangely hopeful. Because it suggests that another way of living is possible.
A way of living in which kindness is not weakness.
A way of living in which forgiveness is not foolishness.
A way of living in which relationships can become places of grace rather than transactions.
So perhaps the question is not whether we have been disappointed by others. Most of us have.
The deeper question is whether disappointment has convinced us to expect less from love itself.
Maybe that is where many of us find ourselves in the city—surrounded by people, carrying old wounds, longing for connection, but afraid to hope for too much.
If that is you, perhaps begin somewhere small.
Send the message. ... Invite someone for coffee. ... Stay a little longer after dinner. ... Listen without hurrying. ... Offer a kindness that expects nothing in return.
Small acts rarely change the world overnight. But they do create small openings where another kind of life can begin. And perhaps the love we long for has always been found there—in the quiet, costly decision to remain open to one another, even in a world that continually teaches us to close ourselves off. Perhaps this is kind of love we all long for.
Perhaps that is what Jesus meant when he said,