The question is not whether or not it is “true love”. The question is whether or not they are truly worth loving

Apologies this post is a little bit all over the place. It is essentially in brain dump format, rather than the format of a coherent post and I have left little notes to myself within the text, until I can take the time to neaten it up further.
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Where love represents an investment of your time, effort/energy and money AND the vulnerability of making yourself, your life, your future, your dreams vulnerable to this other person.

If you were not expecting or needing anything back:
Would this person be worth your time?  What makes someone worthy of your time (to you)?
What makes someone worthy of your effort, your attention, your energy?  Is it: that they would give you that kind of attention in return?  Or is it that they would pay it forward?
Where you have previously cut someone out of your life, what was it about them that finally made you realise that you did not want to spend more of your life on them?  What does this new person have that those other people did not?

If you were needing something back in return:  What is it about this person that makes you sure that they would reciprocate?
[COMPASSION – new article – the missing link in my attitude towards Mr Huggie-Wuggie and everyone else]

For me, what makes someone worthy of my time if I don’t need anything back is if they sincerely appreciate my efforts and my time etc etc. (Plus also if they generally seem to be a good investment of time, energy and effort.) If I do need something back, that is, if I am building a reciprocal friendship then clearly I will need them to reciprocate and readily make sacrifices for me as I make sacrifices for them. These sacrifices do not need to be exactly the same, or transactional – I do something, then you mechanically, automatically, immediately do something else. Rather such is the beauty of friendships or relationships that we will each bring different things to them.  We each have different strengths, we can uphold one another in different ways. Additionally, sometimes it just naturally happens that I as a friend give more, sometimes the friend will give more. However I have come to notice that some supposed “friends” can never give of what is easy or free.  Easy congratulations, easy praise, a few words of encouragement. If they cannot give of what is easy, or free, then I take that as a sign that they cannot or will not give of what is more expensive. For instance, you know how people say “words are cheap”?  Well some people begrudge giving even words.
Not worth it?  By the metrics I have laid out above, some people are not “worth it” for me to invest my time into, even as freebie friends. But I will continue all the same to give them a level of “freebie friendship”, as an expression of unconditional love.  Some people though I will actively unfriend, because it is just more prudent, or they have shown themselves to be dangerous in a way which makes me feel queasy.

What makes someone worthy of making myself vulnerable to them is if I can trust them to nurture and cherish my dreams, rather than dash them. I also need people who can tell me the truth from a place of security, rather than offer false “constructive criticism” which is unsubtly all about pulling me down. Some people give falsely enthusiastic, clearly overblown praise, which frankly is also suspect. The truth is that many people struggle with insecurities, so whether they mean to or not, or whether or not they realise that they are capable of doing this, they will fail to support your dreams at best or actively dash them at worst.

I don’t want to stay at the same level in life, I want to be actively growing. So I need someone whose relationship with being secure is also actively growing. So now they can offer genuine encouragement and support while I am at this level, and X years from now they will still be able to offer genuine encouragement and support when I have attained a new level. It works both ways of course, in that I too will be looking to grow in being secure, so that I will always be able to offer genuine support and encouragement.
Some people start off scarcely being able to find a positive word to say, and then they seem to  grow only more bitter and twisted over time. Question: why do my aspirations cause the slightest bitterness to you whatsoever, when I have only treated you with unfailing kindness and support?  Answer:  because of your insecurities. I don’t know whether such people expect me to hold back from throwing myself headlong at my dreams, while they take seemingly all the time in the world to not actually deal with those insecurities.  If you want to interact closely with someone, then you need to commit to dealing with your insecurities regarding that person. This is an example I have used before: in churches, many times pastors and members will pray for active, passionate and committed new members. They will cry out to God, they will fast, they will go out distributing flyers, they will do everything. I am a strong expression of all these characteristics that they pray for. And yet whenever I come to a church, almost invariably I will clash with the insecurities of those same pastors and members who have presumably been praying for members like me. The fact that I am so spiritually confident almost invariably poses a threat to these people. And then eventually, I will get fed up and I will leave. And then they will try various methods to try to get me back, all of which I will ignore. And the whole thing will almost invariably culminate in my writing angry posts on my blog. Answer:  when you are busy praying for excellent people to join your church, then make sure you pray for yourself the strength and the security to not be threatened by these people when they actually show up, to not always be wanting or needing to assert your superiority, especially when, to be candid, you are not actually superior.

Similarly, if you as a man want an outstanding wife, then you need to pray for yourself the security to not try to belittle who she is, or who she aspires to be, but rather the strength to encourage her in all the things that actually make her outstanding.

I know it works the other way too, regarding my requirements for my husband. However I cannot think of any practical examples off the top of my head of ways in which I might need to modify my behaviour for the sake of the type of husband I am looking for.  Perhaps this would be an obvious one for women: If you want a man who is thriving in his career, then you need to give him the time to actually invest into his career. However,  I have already made a point that for me, while I will happily and eagerly support him in whatever he wants to be  within the boundaries of faith and commitment to Christ, my husband’s career is not a consideration in terms of choosing him as a spouse. I would actually much rather have time with him to talk, to laugh, to chill, to cook, to dress up to take ourselves to exciting restaurants, to eat. However, bearing in mind that I myself am very ambitious, I want to make it clear that I do not want or need a situation where he is the one taking the backseat, supporting my own active career. Rather I am happy and willing to support him too, to any level of his own personal ambition. I guess my instinctive expectation is that he and I will both be working towards exciting goals in which we will be offering one another mutual support. You know, I’m actually quite competitive, perhaps this is something that I will have to address during marriage, tamping down my competitive urges to genuinely support my husband rather than compete with him. The candid truth though, at the moment from where I am sitting is that such is the level of my dreams and various other things, that no-one can truly offer me any genuine competition in who I want to be, just now.

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ALSO: Character, compatibility, potential for emotional connection
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So this post has gone in a completely different direction from what I initially drafted up in my mind. What I had initially meant to say is this:  that in romantic terms, what makes someone truly worthy of love is:
A combination of character and compatibility:
Basic Compatibility – they want a relationship just like you do, they want the same things in relationship and in life.  These are the kind of things that you might find out about someone quite quickly, possibly the first time you meet them, depending on the kinds of conversations you have with people!
Character – They have the necessary character to treat you well in a relationship.  It is the exploration of character that then lets you know whether you can trust any aspects of basic compatibility that you have found with this person.

This is the first time that I have put compatibility over character, because their actively wanting a relationship needs to come first before you check out their character, otherwise you will just be wasting your time.  I guess it is hard to come straight out and ask someone “So are you looking for a relationship?!”  But somehow people tend to communicate this about themselves anyway, in their openness towards you, the way they ask questions or are curious about your life.

Potential for emotional connection:  I guess this is also an expression of compatibility. However I would explore it after you have ascertained great character. Between the two of you, you kinda need to broach the idea of a relationship and I believe that it is within that context of exploring the idea of a relationship that you also explore the potential for emotional connection. This could possibly involve exchanging deep letters between yourselves, finding safe ways to explore touch,  I mean literally touching one another’s hands, or gently holding eye contact. The thing is, you don’t want to do anything that would compromise any future friendship between the two of you, or any future relationship that either of you might go on to have with other people, just in case you eventually decide not to go ahead with the relationship.
Some people might skip out this stage altogether. However for me it is crucial, unless sparks are already visibly flying!  This is because for me I deeply yearn for emotional connection with my husband, and it would not make sense to embark upon a relationship without making sure that that exists. However if sparks are already flying, then I can safely assume that the potential for emotional connection exists.

What most people get wrong: from writing this post, I think that the one thing that most people get wrong is that they don’t check beforehand for great character OR it is within the context of exploring for emotional connection, when they have already made themselves vulnerable to this other person, that they also look out for “red flags”. Red flags as used in a romantic context are essentially irredeemable character failings.
Sometimes you also hear people discuss lack of compatibility with their spouses, in that spouse A wants a certain mode of action/way of living, and spouse B wants something completely different. To me, this indicates that these people were probably drawn together by strong chemistry or physical attraction, leading them to overlook fundamental issues of compatibility.