Taking Love for Granted

What a gift to be able to take love for granted. Much of my life, I thought that for me to take anything for granted was somehow an expression of ingratitude or callousness towards something or someone. Or ingratitude or callousness towards me, if someone took my love for granted. I did not know that to be able to take love for granted was one of the characteristics or substances of love. I did not know that assuming security in love meant that I could simply live in the confidence that love was as certain as a sunrise or sunset, or that it was stronger than fire or flood.

The word “granted” comes from the Latin, credere, which means to give trust to or to have trust for.

It means to believe in such a way as to entrust one’s goods, health, or heart to another. It is a form of security, such that one doesn’t need to spend time in doubt, second-guessing, controlling, worrying, obsessing or paying.

I think that many of us come from places in which we learned that taking love for granted was cavalier, thoughtless, selfish, or dangerous. Quite the opposite of a negative, in actuality, it is an affirmation to the lover.

It says, “I entrust me to you, knowing full-well that you can be trusted.”

I can take you for granted.

So much of our lives can become consumed by the fear of a multitude of rejections, whether in a group, a marriage, a job, etc. If we have a few relationships in which we can take love for granted, what a gift. We have entrusted ourselves to trusting another. What a gift for a child to be able to take love for granted in a parent, for a marital partner to be able to assume such confidence, or for a friend to simply trust that the other is present.

To take love for granted, ironically, leaves so much room for gratitude.

Gratitude in a world of rejection, to know that there are those few whose love we can take for granted. It awakens us to the beauty of the mundane, living life as if something terrible won’t happen. It lets us begin to see what G.K. Chesterton meant when he said that God’s sunrise and sunset is his daily encore of love. We can take God’s daily encore for granted, and how magnificent is it when we see the grandeur of what we can assume is present all the time.