You don’t have to be single to have your love tank be empty.  You can even be surrounded by people and have no one ministering to you in a way that makes you feel loved.  An empty love tank is actually the driving force in Codependency, when parents are too broken or busy or simply uninterested to make a child feel safe, secure, loved and important, and the child grows up always on the hunt for that love they never knew.

An empty love tank leads to all sorts of coping mechanisms.  Every addiction is trying to fill a hole inside of them.  Every compulsion is simply a way to feel or think about something other than the emptiness that comes with rejection and abandonment.    It might be food, drugs, sex, shopping, depression, working, zoning out watching Netflix, but the result is always the same. We want to permanently feel loved and secure, but when we are not, we accept the consolation prize of temporarily feeling pleasure, or feeling nothing at all.

Empty love tanks are very common, especially when you are in relationships where others continually expect you to give.  Whether out of duty or pride or fear of being rejected, you keep trying to give – even when you have nothing left to give.  However, we were never meant to be empty, nor to try to give what we don’t have.

God always intended for us to be filled with love, having more than enough to spare that it spills over onto other people generously.  However, He never intended us to try and get that tank filled by other people.  We were designed to have our love tanks filled by Him continually.

The problem is that, once we have been rejected or ignored by parents or significant others, we feel we need someone with flesh on to prove that we are lovable, since others communicated to us that we weren’t.   We are so sold on the idea that if you are not adored by another person, you aren’t worthy to live.  In high school, I told myself that if no one kissed me by the time I was 23, I would commit suicide.   It is that type of mentality that I am talking about.

While I was still married to my first husband, I was so desperate to feel loved by and significant to someone that I got emotionally involved with someone over the internet.  I knew it was wrong, and that God should be all I need, but He wasn’t. That became a pattern throughout my adult life – wanting love, thinking I’d found love, then feeling rejected by a man, and then needing to prove my self-worth by finding another man to stamp his approval on me. Being wanted by a man was all that mattered – without it, I was worthless.

I always wondered why God’s love for me wasn’t enough to make me feel loved.  Intellectually, I knew He loved me and should be enough for me, but honestly, He never was.   It was like having a crush on one boy at school, and feeling ugly and rejected because he didn’t like me.  However, if another boy (that I wasn’t attracted to) liked me, that didn’t matter.  Only if the boy I liked requited my attraction did it matter.

I didn’t think God’s love could ever meet my need because I was always taught that other people had to approve of you and want you.  What God thought about and toward me didn’t matter in this case. It was like your parents telling you that you are beautiful – it just didn’t count unless a boy said it.

Because I believed the lie that “real love” could only come from a boy who chose me over other girls, I was never even interested in feeling loved by God.  He was never even a contender for my affection, not even as an adult.  I was missing out on the One true love who knew me best and would still love and adore me and never leave or forsake me.

Only recently have I come to understand the power of feeling God’s never failing love for me, not as God but as my Father who adores  and is so proud of me.  I have recognized in Jesus the love of a beloved fiancé who is waiting for our wedding day.  I read the words He says to me and realize He is so very much in love with me.  I have allowed the Holy Spirit to wrap His arms around me to comfort me just as a human with flesh would do, and the results have been the same as with another person.

If you have ever had a long distance relationship, you know how a text message, email, letter or voice mail can radically change your day for the better.  Your lover doesn’t have to be physically present with you for you to feel loved and important.  It is just the knowledge of how they feel about you, how special you are to them, that makes you walk on thin air.  We can feel loved and important and chosen from God in the same way without Him being physically present.

An empty love tank spells disaster in anyone’s life. We will do very stupid things to get it filled back up, or we will give up hope and become hopelessly depressed.  Keeping your love tank filled doesn’t have to depend on who is in your life, either, if you will accept what God says about you as letters from a long distance admirer.

Search for scriptures that speak of his undying love for you and read them as if from a long distance lover, which Jesus truly is.  I’m actually in the process of writing a devotional book with 365 scriptural messages from Him. I’ll share with you my favorite from Song of Solomon 4:7 –

How can you not feel loved when you hear this?

Your sister in Christ,

Penny