Lila’s relationship with the Reverend John Ames teaches her the importance of honesty and openness to developing healthy relationships. Lila and John’s dynamic is unprecedented within Lila’s experience. Before arriving in Gilead, Lila’s closest relationship was with her caretaker and pseudo-mother, Doll. Doll took Lila from her parents when she was an infant, convinced she wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Lila has never known the details surrounding these events and has no access to her origins. Doll is the closest person Lila has ever had to family. Throughout the narrative present, she often finds herself remembering Doll—whom she lost after Doll killed her father. These flashbacks have a melancholy tone which conveys Lila’s longing for love and connection. In the present, however, Lila struggles to accept the love she has found since losing Doll.

Lila’s fear of embracing her and John’s relationship stems from her reluctance to trust other people. Living with Doll, Doane, Marcelle, Arthur, and Mellie on the road taught her that trusting others would only endanger her. From a young age, she has believed that opening up to other people only guarantees others will betray her. These convictions originate from Lila’s birth circumstances. Lila was abandoned and taken as a child. She then lived in fear of everyone around her, convinced that something bad would befall her, that her father would return to steal her back from Doll, that Doll would disappear and forget her, or that her traveling companions would sabotage her for their own comfort. When she befriends and then proposes to the preacher, Lila quickly questions her decision, wondering “What could have made her take such a chance” (115)? Despite all that John does to prove his care and respect for Lila, she remains skeptical of his loyalty and commitment to her. She often fears that he will tell her she doesn’t belong in his home or that she is too “rough and ignorant” (115) to fit into his pious life. These fears keep Lila from opening up to her husband and inviting him into her emotional world and her past.

Over the course of the novel, Lila and John develop a more reciprocal dynamic founded upon mutual vulnerability. From the start of their relationship, John is honest and open with Lila—consistently sharing his woes, shortcomings, fears, sorrows, and hopes with her. He does so as a way to show Lila his humanity, so that in time she will show him her own fallibility. Gradually, Lila begins to share things with John, even referencing her time as a sex worker in St. Louis and her tangential involvement in her own father’s murder. These confessions convey Lila’s desire for true and lasting intimacy, which she can only achieve through mutual honesty and trust.