Surround me with your love by 3-11 Porter

Surround Me With Your Love by 3-11 Porter is fools gold. It looks like a love song but it’s actually a whine of collapsed dependency. Can you tell the difference?

Surround Me With Your Love by 3-11 Porter

This is a song looks like love. But fools’ gold looks like gold, but really is an iron ore. I don’t hear this as love, I hear dependency.

Youtube: Surround me with your love by 3-11 Porter

Full lyrics here.

I’m so lonely
And it feels like disease
Come and stay, stay beside me
Stay always forever don’t go

This is not love. This is not love. If this vibe and sentiment features as all or most of a continuing relationship, then it is not love but helpless clinging. (Yet strangely if it never appears in the relationship, also take care; see below.)

Cyndi Lauper sings about the darkness that “makes you feel so small.” And she has the right answer: to trust inside yourself in the beauty of your true colours. Often something like this happens: people imagine they really are small, and have no beautiful true colours. They become sincerely convinced that the only hope for someone as small and weak as they are is someone outside them who they can depend on, who will fill them up with good things, who will break the terrible feeling of isolation, who will shower them with understanding, who will never leave, who will stay forever and give love to them. Many pop songs resonate this needy attitude without realising, and this is one of them.

From the point of view of the other person in the relationship, the singer is a bottomless pit of need. The singer isn’t an adult. He is a small baby wanting to be taken care of but giving nothing adult in return. Why would this singer’s partner put up with a bottomless sink hole? Why, because she feels exactly the same: small, no good, desperately in need of filling up from outside, wanting the same thing from the singer that he needs from her. If both people feel like this more than occasionally, then the relationship is two beggars clinging to each other in desperation. Quite a lot of human relating is like this!

Yet it’s also true that if this kind of feeling of “I just want to be looked after” comes up sometimes in a relationship, that is very healthy. Because everyone has a small-feeling, weak-feeling part of themselves; that’s natural, normal. It’s universal. It’s absolutely love to take the risk to invite that small, weak part into the relationship. Commonly, we HATE the weak, needy part of ourselves. As the relationship deepens and we take of our dating face, there comes a point to take the risk: Will my partner still love me even if I need to be looked after? Dare I take the risk that my partner finds me ugly, contemptible, nauseating when I need to be taken care of? In Adele’s song River Lea, this is the state the protagonist is in. She’s holding herself back for fear she’ll be found to be fake. And she’s not taking the risk.

But the singer in Surround me with your love isn’t taking a risk. He isn’t creating healing a by bravely stepping our from behind a mask. He’s depressed, he’s sunk in despair, he’s in a slump. He sure needs love, but not at all the form of love he is begging for ( – what he does need, is a story for another day.)

This slump of despairing neediness has a mirror image: counter-dependency. Counter-dependent people are never, ever needy. They don’t need anything, ever; they are independent, always. They never need to be looked after, they are the one who gives, never the one who needs to receive. And this is just as emotionally unreal and un-grown-up as dependent neediness. It is simply a mask which looks better. It can look great, very impressive to behold. But it’s still a protective defence.

The Simon and Garfunkel song I am a rock (Youtube) has this quality of denying hurt needs.

I’ve built walls / A fortress steep and mighty / That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain. / I am a rock, I am an island.
…
If I never loved I never would have cried. / I am a rock, I am an island.
… And a rock feels no pain; And an island never cries.

However, the protagonist in their song has a bitter self-knowledge of cutting off his pain, and truly counter-dependent people don’t have this self-awareness. They are sincerely self-deluded that there is a certain vulnerability which they themselves just do not have. Or, they know but deceive themselves. Between the depressed clinginess of Surround me with your love and the denial of needs of I am a rock, there’s a middle way: sometimes feeling needy and showing it, trusting your true colours are indeed beautiful.

“Gratefulness is heaven itself. ”
– William Blake

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