Aboard a passenger ship sailing from Los Angeles to Australia, I met a pretty young American woman named Jackie. During the voyage, I gathered that Jackie was traveling Down Under in search of her ideal mate. It seemed she wanted a Marlborough Man and so far had found only Marshmallow Men.
The following year in Washington, D.C. I knew a writer in his thirties who went to Ireland to seek a bride less sexually used and emotionally damaged than women he had dated in America.
Such quests are extreme, and I learned later that neither worked out. Yet hardly less earnest are coast-to-coast weekend mass pilgrimages to singles venues, or exhaustive Internet searches for dates, or the fluster of women counting off their thirties while still not finding The One.
Looking for love is difficult for most of us. I suspect this is mainly because of the oddly unrealistic way our society teaches us to go about it. Yet, as Christians, we have a more realistic way spelled out for us.
Could this be love?
We tend to think of love as a single, specific thing (probably because our language offers only a single word for it). Yet “love” is one of the vaguest terms in the English language. Surveys have shown that a majority of people can’t even say exactly what it means. How, then, can they be sure what they’re looking for—and what they’ll find?
More realistically: Psychologists Clyde and Susan Hendrick of Texas Tech University identify six kinds of love: eros (romantic), ludus (game-playing), storge (companionate, or devoted friendship), pragma (practical or calculating), mania (roller-coaster emotionalism) and agape (altruistic). They drew the names from classical Greek probably because ancient Greeks used at least ten distinct words for love.
The offshoot: We can take our choice of loves, with companionate and altruistic the generous loves of Christian living.
Where is the love?
The society tells us that love is out there somewhere, and our job is to find it and catch it, in the form of a supplier. If we can just land the right person, the promise goes, we will be happy ever after.
More realistically: Love is less where we find it than where we put it. In the words of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross,
Where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love.”
So rather than spending lots of time and emotional effort looking for a perfect lover, we’d be better off creating perfect love.
Dream lover
Many of us carry a mental image of our ideal lover. Recalls author Jodi Seidler, “I had (I kid you not) a three-and-a-half-page checklist of attributes my future partner had to have.”
Daters often reject prospects who come up short, rather than reduce their inventory of desires. As a 38-year-old Los Angeles talent agent put it: “… since I’ve waited all this time and walked away from guys who were close but not quite there, I think I deserve not to settle for anything less than everything I really want.”
Natalie, a 32-year-old photographer, goes further:
Every time I start to relax a bit into a relationship… I start having doubts along the lines of what else is out there that might be better. I wonder if this guy will satisfy my future needs, even if I don’t know what those are yet.”
Despite all the requirements crowding the checklists of women and men, a poll taken by Time/CNN found that 80 percent of both believe they eventually will find their perfect partner.
More realistically: Long-term compatibility is based on common values, respect and loving kindness, rather than judgment of imperfections. Meanwhile, dream lovers are exactly that: our dreams. We can’t order up the ideal mate á la carte—a little of this and some of that—since people come as package deals, just as we ourselves do.
It seems wiser to break up with the checklist and work on accepting people as they happen to be. Meanwhile, our task is less to locate the ideal person than to become an ideal person.
Give me love.
Living in a society persuaded that consumption is the main route to happiness, aspiring lovers often set out to be to be consumers of love as well. They see love not as something to give but something to get. Their aim is fixed on being loved more than loving.
I want you, I need you, therefore I love you,” is the feeling. And the result: “If you give me what I want, I’ll dote on you. But if you don’t, I’ll hate you and throw a tantrum.”
More realistically: Preoccupied with getting instead of giving, consuming rather than producing, this is love as we see infants doing it. It’s baby-love, where we all begin and many older people in our society remain.
A more grown-up love sees partners not just as handy gadgets to meet needs and fill desires. Rather, they are valued as people in their own right, to be equally respected and served. Growing lovers feel a strong need to give as well as get, and to promote each others’ welfare as their own.
Practicing servant-love leads to growth in both emotional maturity and ability to love beneficially. Psychologists tell us that most wedded couples whose marriages endure have succeeded in rising from self-indulgent passion to this compassionate level of love.
Feeling or activity?
We are taught to think of love as passive feeling, something we fall into (and the rest is automatic?). Then we measure the quality or depth of our love by intensity of feeling. If we fall out again, it wasn’t “the real thing,” or we had the wrong partner.
More realistically: Feelings come and go, rise and fall, ebb and flow. One study of brain chemistry suggests that intense romantic love lasts between twelve and eighteen months.
Psychologist Dorothy Tennov measured the statistical time-span of romantic relationships as between eighteen and thirty-six months, with an average duration in present-day society of approximately two years. After that, she said, couples either drift apart or replace the fading thrills with a more rational and generous “genuine love of affectional bonding.”
The realest thing
Effective love, or lasting love, or Christian love is an activity, regardless of feeling. It might better be spelled G-I-V-E and measured not by how we feel but by how we treat people.
Countering the confusion surrounding love in our society, Scripture makes this point many times over. For example, how should we understand the Gospel of John?
- God so loved the world that he enjoyed excited feelings about it, wanted it, needed it, and couldn’t live without it? That makes no sense at all.
- God so loved the world that he agreed to a 50-50 deal, giving it what it gave him? That’s no better.
- “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This says it as it is.
Or as Jesus put it plainly:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR:
Bruce Brander is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in sociological subjects. He worked on the staffs of newspapers in New Zealand and the United States and was a writer and editor for National Geographic. For many years he served as traveling journalist and editor for World Vision Christian relief and development agency. He is author of six books on travel and social issues, including Love That Works: The Art and Science of Giving. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife Mary, an artist. They have four children.
