From Scot McKnight's One.Life
THE THREE HARDEST WORDS TO SAY TODAY: “I.LOVE.YOU.”
Humans, Jesus’ dream constantly affirms, are made to love one another, and only in loving others do humans become fully human. Humans are wired to connect with one another and in that relational connection the electricity of love flows and lights up the human being. (Sex is only one part of this electric connection.) But somehow four lies about love have been hoisted from the depths of nonsense and downloaded into the culture of our world. They are these: I love you means …
Lie #1: I am needy.
Lie #2: I am weak.
Lie #3: I am dependent (or co-dependent).
Lie #4: I lose my independence.
Our culture has rammed this list of system-crashing lies into the minds and hearts of this generation. Yes, some humans connect to others out of an unhealthy neediness or weakness and become co-dependent and lose their sense of self. But, God made us to love others and to connect to others and it is not wrong to be social and to fall in love so much that you feel like you can’t exist without another person — I know I felt that way when I fell in love with my wife, Kris. I just didn’t want to live without her (and still don’t). I was fifteen and Kris was fifteen; we were sophomores in high school. I couldn’t wait to see her between classes and after school and on the weekends. The world, so it seemed to me, wasn’t complete unless Kris was in it.
We’ve been with one another for more than three decades, which means we’ve done lots of things together. Every evening for the last eight years, usually around 4:00 p.m., I make our dinner salad. I get out the spinach leaves and the cutting board and the knife and the bowl, and I wash the leaves and then cut the leaves carefully into smaller bits. Then I get out broccoli slaw and tomatoes and onions and Pecorino Romano cheese and dried berries and nuts and broccoli florets and carrots. Then I begin to chop away, and in about fifteen minutes the salad is ready.
You might be wondering why I’ve only been doing this for eight years, so I’ll tell you: Kris and I had been married for twenty-eight years before it dawned on me to help in the kitchen. Kris is a psychologist, and she knew just how to handle my eagerness at that point. She encouraged me, and within two days the job was mine! What I’m telling you is that love is not simply about dopamine rushes and about special moments of intimacy.
Love in the Bible is about being with someone in a lifetime commitment, and the routine activities of our days — like making salad — are inherent to what it means to be with someone. I am with Kris in these sorts of ways, and it is this kind of “withness” that shapes our marriage and our love.
Many today think we have progressed beyond those days of rapturously loving another person so much we don’t feel complete without them or committing ourselves to be with another person for a lifetime. Leonora Epstein, in a CNN.com column,47 was speaking with her therapist about her struggles in relationships and thinking the feminist therapist might just delve into some “childhood father complex” when her therapist uttered these jaw-dropping words: “Some women are just happier in a relationship.”
Epstein questioned herself: “Huh? Isn’t the modern woman supposed to be totally amazing on her own?” Then she thought through her own story to discover this: “When in committed relationships, I was happier. When single, I was depressed.” What was most jaw-dropping in her reflections was this conclusion: “And perhaps ‘needing a man’ is an indication of the more basic human instinct — not for reproduction, but for companionship.” Leonora is not about to give up on her “better alone” thinking though: “The idea still doesn’t sit right with me as someone who has put so much energy into making me happy.”
The message of our culture is to do it on your own and to get your affirmations from yourself and your accomplishments: “Don’t make the commitment for life but just see how long it lasts.” So we have a generation of highly inspired workaholics who are struggling with the decision to avoid companionship as a central goal of life and, as other studies are showing, they are becoming more and more depressed because of the absence of committed relationships.
Instead of being taught that the aim of life is to love God and to love others, including (if chosen) a bonding relationship with one person as a commitment to be “with” that person for life, our culture teaches that committed love is a constraint on a life already full with all kinds of goals. Instead of being taught that sex flows from genuine love and that genuine love craves commitment, our culture hears that raspy voice of Tina Turner: “What’s love got to do with it?”
For instance, a woman named Sienna said it this way: “Commitment to a boyfriend, carried out with the same intensity, seemed like one expectation too much.” That is to say, some believe they can’t afford to invest time, energy, and emotion in a deep relationship. “Hooking up appears to be a practical alternative.”
A young man named Tom, who likes sex, puts it flippantly because his focus is on other things: “I think that guys don’t want to worry about having a girlfriend so much. It’s, like, somewhat of a burden.” The burden or constraint of committed love, which alone satisfies human relationships, has become an optional part of life for many. Laura Sessions Stepp says this so well: “Sigmund Freud is said to have believed that a happy life is made up of two things: love and work. Society has asked [today’s] young women to choose between the two, and they’ve chosen work, at least for the short term.” The instinct to work is clashing with the potentially soul-satisfying demands of lasting love.
Our culture, and clearly this can be exaggerated, finds “I love you” to be the hardest three words to say. Why? This generation knows what real love costs and that it means committing to be with someone forever. A young Duke University woman named Anne Katharine Wales says this:
“Somewhere along the line most of us have gotten really close to someone, maybe even fallen in love… For some reason, this scares us beyond belief. Somehow this doesn’t fit with our plan of achieving our dreams. We want to be independent; we want to go off and change the world in our own way. But we never planned on falling for someone else.” The result is a generation that is wary and cynical and selfish and anxious about love. That wariness is wounding this generation deeply and hooking up is not satisfying its yearnings.
ROMANCE, ANYONE?
Studies show that the deepest kind of romance desired today is that a young woman wants a boyfriend and a young man wants a girlfriend, and they want to hold hands in public, going on official dates, and just plain talking with one another. In other words, they want someone who will be “with” them in a loyal way.
Donna Freitas interviewed a sexy young woman named Amy. She’s hot and she likes to dress the part and young men like her to be hot and dress the part. She knows it. It “helps me feel good about myself,” she says. “I just want to be fun.” Freitas observes that “being fun” has led Amy down a painful path, and she offers a potent observation that lies at the core of Amy’s dream: “There is one major thing that the girl who seems to have everything is missing: a boyfriend.” After getting to know Amy, Freitas says: “Amy really wants to find a boyfriend, someone who will love her.
She’s tried everything she knows: hooking up, being friends with benefits, playing hard to get. Nothing has worked.” She continues: “[Amy wanted] a real boyfriend, one who loved her and respected her, and who would admit to their relationship in public by doing something as simple as asking her on a date or holding her hand while walking across campus.” What Amy wants is the norm, but our culture—your culture — works against it.
Donna Freitas discovered in talking to college students that the number one romantic experience was “just talking” and “talking for hours.” In fact, Hephzibah Anderson, in her confession of a year-long commitment to chastity, described how relationships without sex were more romantic and emotionally satisfying, because, as she puts it: “When you’ve closed yourself off physically, it’s easier to open up emotionally.”
This is where a good dose of Jesus’ kingdom vision deconstructs a culture gone terribly awry. For Jesus, the kingdom vision of love, justice, peace, and wisdom shapes everything. Personal relationships, because they emerge out of that vision, will also be shaped by love, justice, peace, and wisdom. Romance is a desire and love is a desire because God wired us to connect with others, and to connect deeply — emotionally, spiritually, physically, and sexually. But emotional, spiritual, physical, and sexual love only work well between two who are committed enough to start a family and to be with one another forever. (I’m not suggesting that singleness is wrong; I am saying that lovelessness, in the sense of lasting commitment, is contrary to how we are designed.)
When I was blogging about how love and sex have become disconnected and how love in our culture has become something to fear rather than something to pursue, a professor at a Midwest liberal arts university, Anette Ejsing, offered a set of stunning observations about what is going on with young women today in a world where sexual relations have hopped the rails of decency. She writes that what is being described in the hook-up culture “is a state of being no woman can sustain.” With wisdom, Anette warns of the breakdown of love that will happen to those in the hook-up culture. She says: It must [or, will] morph into something else, which could include the following:
Men cannot be trusted, I want to stick closer to my girlfriends than my male partners.
Maybe I even want to explore sexual relationships with women I can trust because they also feel the same way.
People cannot be trusted, so I would rather be an island unto others.
I feel unworthy of someone’s love, so I will not dare to hope in love (from a partner, or others).
Depression! (It only takes a brief glance at stats on the use of antidepressants among young adults and college students to realize this is happening a lot.)
Sexuality is a much more integral part of who we are as human beings than we generally care to admit.
What would Jesus say? Jesus is weeping. Why? Not simply because purity codes have been crossed but because what lies behind the traditional Jewish (biblical) laws about sex express what matters most to Jesus: love, justice, peace, and wisdom. Our culture has distorted love from the inside out.
There’s a better way.
To go to the next section - https://fightforyourfaith.blogspot.com/2023/08/romance-or-fidelity-which-will-it-be.html
To go to the previous section - https://fightforyourfaith.blogspot.com/2023/08/sex-love-and-faith-do-they-connect.html
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