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Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and meditation teacher, often tells a story of a dog tied to a tree.

You walk over there to pet it, and it lunges, shows its teeth, growls. You come to see its foot is in a trap. 

How do you feel now? Hopefully, you have some form of empathy for it. You have compassion. You’d think something along the lines of “Poor baby!” 

Now if you are a highly sensitive and empathetic person like me who also deeply values compassion, you would want to feed it, care for it. You again think something like, “Oh it just needs some real love. Once it understands I am good, it will warm up to me. I can change him with my kindness!”

But often, I think that we only are getting half of the social parable here. Yes, compassion is great, but we are never supposed to stay in the trap with him. 

With stops from the Bible, from Buddhism, from Aesop’s fables, our culture has handed us shorthand for compassion—turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor, bodhisattvas who stay for the suffering of others. Somewhere in translation, we quietly rewrote “have compassion” into “sacrifice yourself,” and we can definitely see this mistranslation most clearly in how a lot of women were taught to mistake hope as romantic love. 

Now, I’m not saying we even do this consciously. I’ve had clients who were so adamant they’d never do this, and yet, surprise, it was so deeply embedded and conditioned in us that it was there inside them, although somewhat hidden.

That’s because we weren’t just quietly taught this. Think about it. We were shown it, on display, treated as beautiful. Emily Dickinson called hope “the thing with feathers…that never stops at all.” 

Walk into half the homes in America and you’ll find it hanging on a wall: Faith. Hope. Love. Stacked together like a trinity, hope sitting right next to love itself, as if they’re the same virtue. 

We don’t hang “Boundaries” on a plaque. We don’t hang “Evidence” or “Look at the facts, lady!” on a plaque, although maybe I wish we did! We hang “Hope” and then we wonder why we can’t tell it apart from love.

Then we have the romance movies. We have been sold this idea that hope has a huge payoff: in the last 10 minutes he admits his love for the woman who stayed. 

Esther Perel—the psychotherapist behind Mating in Captivity, who’s spent decades studying desire and relationships—put words to the formula every rom-com ran on: obstacle plus attraction equals desire. We didn’t just learn how to earn love from those movies. We learned that his resistance was the plot—that staying through it was the love story, and the payoff for our patience was guaranteed.

Y’all, I hate to admit it, but we have pedestaled hope.

We have translated that it is a “virtue” and it will ultimately redeem us. 

I wonder especially about women because we are explicitly socialized to hold the relationship temperature, to be accommodating, to be patient; well, I wonder if we tangled up all these cultural components to form an unhealthy pattern of hoping, staying, tolerating. 

I want to go back to Tara Brach for a minute. She never told us to stay in the trap with the dog. She told the story to build our compassion, not to trap us there too. 

Dogs bite. That’s what a hurt, cornered animal does. Compassion means understanding why. But it was never supposed to mean standing there and taking it, over and over, waiting for the day it stops. We don’t have to keep putting our hand there by its mouth.

Brach tells us: “One misunderstanding is that acceptance and compassion amount to condoning, complacency, or resignation. On the contrary, true acceptance is a courageous willingness to face reality as it is right now, and compassion brings tenderness to the life of the moment. Only with this radically allowing and tender presence can we respond from our full intelligence and heart.”

The words that stick out the most for me are: “face reality as it is right now” and “respond with our full intelligence and heart.”

So I guess I am asking us women to see where our discernment is lacking when we grasp so tightly on this hope. 

I think many of women can’t see hope clearly. And how could we with what our culture has also placed on us?

But what if we took hope down off the pedestal?

What if we stopped thinking things like:

>> “Oh my love will change him!”

>> “If I just wait and prove my loyalty, he will see that I am the one!”

>> “But he is really trying! You just have to see when he is good!”

>> “You should see/hear what his ex really is like!”

>> “He has suffered a lot as a child!”

>> “He said when his kids graduate high school, he will be ready for a relationship!”

We focus on their trap without seeing the trap we are getting in with regards to this hope, the waiting, the compassion, and without “our full intelligence.”

My therapist once said, “Hope can be a poison.” It has taken me several years to understand what she meant. 

I want us to untangle this hope together.

Hope should get quieter over time because the imagining, the predicting, the waiting, the interpreting fades, because the real live moment becomes the evidence of the relationship, not the longing. If hope is the only “life support” you have with them, there isn’t a relationship.

If we have to get more inventive, go deeper, find their backstories, give our friends more context on who they are, if we have to add story after story to illustrate why this is “our person” and they just need more time instead of facing the reality of the moment, we probably don’t have the relationship we think.

We all have baggage. But what people do with their baggage, what choices they make show us their character, their intent. That doesn’t require our love, patience, or waiting. Our goodness doesn’t motivate their change. We must watch who they are today not who we wish they become. 

So I urge us all to look at where hope is placed in our relational life. Are we calling hope “romance”? Are we allowing their pain to dictate our hearts without using our much needed full intelligence and discernment? 

Let’s make sure we simply aren’t switching out one trap for another at our own cost. 

~

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