When I was a teenager, in high school, there was a popular expression that was shared online, or written in notebooks, or said aloud. It was a saying that was said. The saying went like this: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” Only girls and young women were saying this saying. I’ve never heard a boy or man say it, and I think it’s safe to say that it was only girls who used this phrase. I was just a simple teenage boy, starting to like girls more seriously, dating, wanting to date sometimes but getting rejected, breaking up, and all that. You know, typical high school stuff.
Throughout all that, I kept seeing this phrase again and again, and I found it quite odd, even back then. What does it mean? Since it was always posted by girls, I assumed it was directed at boys and men, and I was a boy. I’m supposed to “handle” the girl at her worst, and if I’m unable to do that, then I don’t deserve her at her best. Okay. Why is this stipulation even being made? What is her “worst?” Maybe I don’t want to handle her at her worst, if her worst is particularly bad. There were always unstated assumptions that the “best” was worth the “worst,” and that the other party wants to engage in this worst/best arrangement. They might not even want to, let alone “can’t” and “deserve.”
It’s kind of a reverse-deserving situation, if you overthink about it [which I do]. Like, because your best is supposedly so amazing, you deserve to have someone handle your worst. It always seemed like a slight justification for shitty behavior, though I don’t know if it actually manifested into any actual extra-shitty behavior. The best justifies the worst type of thing.
As I got a bit older, the phrase fell out of fashion. It even became popular to make fun of it in memes. If you can’t handle me at my X, then you don’t deserve me at my Y. Insert words or pictures for X and Y, and you’ve got yourself a meme.
But people still talked about “deserving” in a romantic sense. “You deserve better,” “You deserve someone who treats you right,” “You deserve someone who appreciates you,” “You deserve someone who treats you as a priority,” “You deserve love,” and so on. Young women say these things to each other a lot, but friends have also said these things to me. And my question is: why would those things be true? Why do I deserve love? What about me makes me deserving of love?
I mean, I’m a decent person, I try to do the right thing, I try to treat people right, I make people laugh a lot, and I do interesting things. That’s fine, but why would I then deserve love? Sure, it would be nice if I met someone, fell in love with them, and they loved me back. That would be awesome, but I’m still very hesitant to say that I deserve love. Being a decent person doesn’t mean you deserve love. Being a decent person just means you’re a decent person.
Now, some people who say these things are just being nice, just being encouraging. But some really do believe it. They believe that everyone deserves love, and when someone doesn’t find love, it’s a tragedy. But this deserving is always a general deserving and not a specific deserving. You deserve to be loved by someone, but you don’t deserve love from any given person. In fact, people are often repulsed by the idea of deserving a specific person’s love. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re entitled to them loving you back. You don’t deserve their love because of your love.
I like to think of it as a quantum mechanical wave function collapse, which I don’t fully understand. I’ll briefly explain. A particle doesn’t behave like a small version of the things we can see and touch, like a marble. It behaves quite differently. We can see a marble’s position as it moves around. But with particles, there’s not a obviously defined position of the particle. It’s more like a “cloud” of probability of where the particle is. At a specific time, when an “observation” occurs, the cloud collapses to a single point, and that’s the particle’s location. I think of love in a similar way. We each have a cloud of love-deserving. Some parts of the cloud mean that we find love, and other parts of the cloud, we don’t. You have this cloud of love-deserving, but when an individual comes into your life, the cloud collapses into a single point, and that point’s position indicates whether they love you or not. Make sense?
In this way of thinking, you both deserve and don’t deserve love. The problem, then, is this: even if you deserve love, in general, it doesn’t mean anything if no one actually loves you. You may have this cloud of love-deserving-probability, but if it always collapses to the area where the person doesn’t love you back, then it doesn’t matter that you have the cloud at all. If time and time again, you never find love, then there’s no point in being deserving of love. It’s just an empty promise.
So my real thoughts are this: the idea that you or I or anyone deserves love is not a worthwhile idea. And perhaps “deserving” is not something you can achieve, but it is something you can lose. You can’t positively deserve someone’s love, but you can definitely not deserve their love by mistreatment and abuse.
Lefty Forrester 