Dear bunnies,
I’ve been sitting with something for a while now, and I finally have words for it. This one is about who we let close, and what that closeness does to us. Read it slow.
Loving someone means loving what they love. And, you don’t plan it, it just happens. You feel it before you can name it. A song you used to skip becomes a song you know every word to. A hobby that meant nothing to you becomes something you talk about like it’s yours. An opinion that used to sound strange coming out of your mouth now comes out easy. None of that is about the song, or the hobby, or the opinion. It’s about who you love. Once I noticed it in one small thing, I started noticing it everywhere.
I know myself. I know what I want. I know what I will love and what I won’t, and nothing forces that choice out of me. But loving a person is different. Loving people is different. It doesn’t ask first.
I noticed this in myself long before. I looked at what filled my days, and none of it started with me. It started with someone I loved. The people we loved. I followed it in.
I never once decided to.
That is what love does. It doesn’t stay small. It reaches into everything the person you love reaches into. Their music becomes your music. Their opinions start to sound reasonable, even the ones you used to argue with. Their pace becomes your pace.
You don’t notice the changes while it happens. You notice it after, when you look at your own life and see someone else’s fingerprints all over it.
I used to think that was just how closeness worked. Then I read a verse that made me look at it differently.
“Do not love the world or the things in the world.” That’s First John, and before I read it as a warning about music or hobbies, small things that don’t matter.
But now, I think it makes love honest about what it is. Love was never going to sit in one corner of your life. It was never going to leave the rest of you alone.
Love for the world pulls you toward everything the world wants. The cravings. The comparisons. The hunger for more. That’s not about the things themselves. It’s a warning about direction.
What you love, you turn toward. What you turn toward, you walk toward.
But the pull runs both ways. I have also loved people who made me steadier. I picked up their patience the same way I could have picked up someone else’s restlessness.
I already knew how to be gentle. But I watched someone I loved reach for gentleness first instead of last, and that made me reach for mine sooner too.
I learned to sit still in hard conversations instead of running from them, because I had watched someone I loved do exactly that, over and over, until it started to feel like mine.
So this isn’t only a warning. It’s a picture of how love works, in both directions.
There’s a reason it works this way. You don’t become like someone by accident. You become like them because somewhere along the way, you started admiring what you saw.
Admiration means you looked at a person and saw something good, patience, courage, kindness, and you wanted it for yourself. Not their approval. The good itself.
So you reached for it, the same way you had watched them reach for it. Closeness alone does not make you better. It only makes you similar.
Admiration is what turns closeness into growth, because you are not copying a person. You are pursuing the good you saw in them first.
But admiration has a line too. You can admire someone without losing yourself in them.
Admiration means you see good in someone and you reach for it. Losing yourself means you stop asking whether that good is yours to want, or if you only want it because someone else has it. That is the difference.
You can love someone’s patience without becoming a copy of them. You can want their courage without needing their approval first.
The moment admiration asks you to forget who you are, it stops being admiration. It becomes something else wearing admiration’s face.
I said earlier that I know myself, what I want, what I will love and what I won’t. That was not only a fact about my taste in music or taste in everything.
It is the ground that admiration needs to stay safe. Admiration works when you already know who you are. It gives you something to grow toward, not someone to disappear into.
You can walk toward someone’s goodness and still stay exactly who you are.
The question was never whether love changes you. It always does. What kept me up at night was a harder question underneath that one.
I used to think the real question was who deserves my love, our love. Everyone does, of course. But that was never the real question.
The real question is what my love teaches me to want. Does it pull me toward patience, or toward performance? Toward peace, or toward proof that I matter?
I have loved people with my whole heart and still had to sit with that question. To love someone well, I had to keep asking it.
Asking it didn’t make me love people less. It changed how I paid attention while I loved them.
I don’t love less because of this. I don’t guard myself so tightly that no one gets close either.
I watched people do that once. They called it wisdom but it’s not. It was fear wearing wisdom’s clothes.
What I learned instead is to pay attention to where my loves take me. Before I hand someone my attention, my time, my energy, I try to notice what I will start to want once they are inside my life. Because they will be.
That’s not a flaw in love. That’s what love is for. But paying attention on my own has a limit. I needed something steadier than my own noticing.
This is where grace finds me. It’s not a rule against love. It’s the thing that steadies what I love and why.
When I stay close to Jesus, my loves pass through something steadier than my own cravings. I still love people fully. I just don’t mistake every pull toward someone as a pull I have to follow.
Every one of us deserves to be loved well, and to love someone well in return.
So be careful who you love.
Not because love is a trap, but because it’s a door. Whatever they love walks through it with them. Choose someone whose love you would want walking through yours too.
P.S. If you’re reading this and wondering whose fingerprints are on your life right now, that’s not a bad question to sit with. It might be the most honest one you ask this week.
