“We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve”
A thorough elaboration of The Perks Of Being Wallflowers movie and how it teaches us to heal, choose, and love ourselves first before loving others.
The quote “We accept the love we think we deserve” has a layered meaning behind it. The first time I read it, it was easy for me to brush it off from my mind. However, I realized it is more than just a quote, it is significant words that reflect the dynamics of romance in the movie as well as in our lives. I was at the age of high school when the first time I encountered this quote from The Perks of Being Wallflowers movie. This quote appears twice in the movie. The first time is in the conversation between Charlie (the main character) with Mr. Anderson (his English teacher). The second time, it appears in the conversation between Sam (Charlie’s friend) and Charlie himself. Although the quote appears twice, the context and the position of Charlie as the main character are different in each conversation.
In the first conversation, The glimpse of Charlie recalled back as he asked his teacher “Why do nice people always choose the wrong people to date?”. I still remember how Mr. Anderson stared at Charlie and contemplated for a while before answering calmly “We accept the love we think we deserve”. This question is motivated by his form of answer-seeking of the reality that he could not add up as he watches his sister being the victim of an abusive relationship while being the most caring and kindest person he has ever known. He still can not comprehend how it is so hard for people like her to get out of the never-ending rabbit hole of unhealthy relationships when they truly deserve more than they have now. And it is even harder for him to not be able to do anything to help his sister — something that Charlie struggles with throughout the movie: feeling helpless while seeing others in ache, watching as they circle the same pattern and devote themselves to people who are not as worthy as them, who are not good for themselves.
In other scenes, the character Sam (Charlie’s friend) also deals with the same unhealthy relationship and past sexual abuse. Sam was sexually abused by her father’s friend since she was seven years old. This abuse did not end for some time and when she was mature enough, the trauma exploded and projected into the romantic relationship she had with Craig (Sam’s boyfriend) who cheated on her several times, yet she remains forgiving towards him. When Sam tries to open up to Charlie, She pulls up a question that is coincidently similar to the question Charlie asked Mr. Anderson — “Why do I, and everyone I love, pick people who treat us like we’re nothing?” then after that, Charlie answered with the quote he took from Mr. Anderson, “We accept the love we think we deserve”.
Back then, I was naïve enough to think that the quote was nonsense, but as I grew older and passed a certain maturity I recognized that, we as a human being always have certain moments when we become Charlie — watching someone we love trap inside an unhealthy relationship, yet we can not do anything unless wishing they can find their way out. Other times we also become Sam, being the victim of unhealthy love — watching ourselves being destroyed and ruined without us even realizing it. We hide behind “loyalty” as if it’s the most sacred thing we know about. We masquerade love for something terrible. Perhaps that’s why many people are afraid to fall in love. For me, love isn’t supposed to be confusing and scary, right? It isn’t supposed to be roaring like a hurricane. Love is supposed to be calm like a soothing breeze on a spring. Perhaps all this time, it’s not love that’s been terrifying, but rather what lurks within us that’s truly frightening. It’s the eerie fragments within ourselves left unresolved, haunting traces that often drive us to flee from wounds that should have been healed. We unconsciously become sicken beings, passing on our pain within the realm of love, and it’s from there that love transforms into something grim, agonizing, and utterly terrifying.
I believe each human has a different impression of embracing love into their lives. It would be never-ending arguments when we talk about “what is love?” and “How does love feel like?”. However, to understand a form of love is to understand ourselves. The term “We accept the love we think we deserve” pinpoints how people tend to end up in relationships where they are treated as well as or as poorly as they believe they deserve. If someone thinks they are undeserving of real, calm, healthy love and affection, they may attract a confusing, toxic relationship instead. This quote suggests that to own goodness we must believe that we deserve to accept it.
We might wonder if is there any being in this world who is not ready to accept goodness into their lives? What a moron to not be willing to accept goodness in this life! Well, probably declaring that we deserve goodness is easier than practicing it daily. As a person who was raised in a religious environment, I must say, that it is not once have I heard someone say “God will not burden us with something more than we can bear — something more than our capacity to hold”. Paradoxically, these words also can be applied to the blessing we wish to have, which apparently or perhaps we can not attract because the truth is “God also will not give us something more than we can handle — something more than our capacity to accept it”.
As I try to grasp this idea, the next question pops out in my mind — why for some people, it is hard to create space for good things to come into their lives? From contemplating a lot of things and reading several journals and sources, I finally found the answer — It is the familiar pattern that somehow tricks us into not becoming someone who deserves something more and better. Yes, our brain sometimes can be our biggest enemy without us realizing it. Our brain with its complexity will always drive us to choose and settle down for preferences that we are used to, or something that is being exposed to us repeatedly as a defense mechanism from things that we are unfamiliar with. When our brain encounters something we are not familiar with, even if it’s subconsciously, it tends to perceive it as something unsafe or untrustworthy. Our brains will not consider whether those things that we are unfamiliar with are good for our lives or not. Like a detection machine, when the brain encounters something foreign, it immediately signals our body and consciousness to reject it.
However, I also understand that humans are not born like robots, which produce the same memories and personalities. Some people are born and grow up carrying wounds that cannot be healed and they bring it until they become adults. Some people are Charlies with all his worries. Some people are Sams with their abusive trauma. Some people grow up with wounds that make them see the world from a different perspective, people who are treated viciously continually until they feel that happiness is not something they deserve. People who hold hands with suffering as their best friends. People who are not used to living calmly because being hyper-vigilant is the common rule to face the world as if they are walking on eggshells waiting for their world to collapse. Those people see stability, tranquility, healing, and security as something strange, something uncommon to comprehend —Perhaps those people are me, those people are you, those people are all of us.
So, to end that endless cycle of hell, the most important thing we must do is heal. Learning to heal is a part of loving ourselves. Give ourselves time to process the wounds and understand that our ability to love ourselves is a reflection of the kind of people we allow to be part of our lives. In the end, the reality and love we accept is a projection of how much love and worth we have for ourselves. If we don’t know how to love ourselves, the world will keep sending us someone who doesn’t know how to love us because we think that type of unhealthy love is something we deserve. But Oh dear! You deserve more. I deserve more. We deserve more — We have a thousand capacities to accept gentle love into our lives as long as we let ourselves heal. As long as we believe that we are more than all the traumas and wounds we have. Like Charlie said, “We’re not sad stories, we’re alive” — and when that moment comes, when we already become fully healed — In that moment, I swear, we are infinite.
