Love Life
We love because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19 ESV
Loved – A few years ago I wrote an article about seeking the perfect love. I’m publishing it again with a few additions because I need the reminder. Maybe you do too.
- The idea of romantic love, invented in the Enlightenment and perpetrated by this culture, is false. It is worse than false. It is a lie – a powerful, seductive lie that twists relationships into contractual (spoken or unspoken) exchange agreements. Rather than finding a partner whom we can serve with delightful enrichment, we look for someone who can serve us! And the predictable result is that we find what we are looking for – self-serving inwardly focused narcissism – only to discover that the one we thought would be so invested in us isn’t what we wanted – because the focus has always been on what WE wanted, not what we are able to give.
- God does not punish us for these mistakes. We take care of that by ourselves. There are consequences for every action – even if we think we can avoid them, delay them or modify them. So, choosing to measure our relationships by what they do for us has consequences. The scars of guilt, the wounds of lost trust, the remorse of life not given away, the pangs of constant fear of rejection. It is an unfortunate consequence of living that we often don’t realize these things until many years afterward. Then it is too late to repair the damage. Since we ignore the advice of those who have already suffered such errors in judgment, believing, of course, that their mistakes do not apply to us, we march blindly toward our self-serving goals, not recognizing the eternal wreckage we leave along the way.
- In the end, life is about friendship. Loves come and go. Friends last. The reason they last is because we make a commitment to them regardless of their behavior. Of course, sometimes the behavior destroys the friendship, but that should never happen because we caused it. Since friendship is the real objective, making friends is the paramount goal of relationship management. It is an inevitable and unfortunate consequence of human behavior that sexual attraction often interferes with this goal, altering a friendship into an exchange for a common self-serving benefit.
But the bottom line is this: until you make a friend of the one you wish to love, and keep that friendship, you have nothing more than a series of self-seeking encounters. The end of the road of self-seeking is loneliness – a deep sense of never actually being loved for who you are, of being unacceptable as you are. This is almost never the result of the other person’s inability to love. It is almost always the result of our unwillingness to seek the best for the other person even at our own expense. In other words, if you have experienced loss in important relationships, there is a very good chance the cause is your own desire to make the relationship meet your needs rather than acting as if the relationship is an opportunity for you to serve in whatever way possible the needs of the other. Friendship is the solution, not romance. Where romance breeds pseudo-friendship, self-seeking brings broken hearts. In order to be loved, one must first be a friend – and a friend never gives up caring for the other person.
- Friends are friends even if they don’t agree. Lovers become enemies when they don’t agree. You can measure the degree of your friendship with another person by your willingness to honor his or her life even when you disagree. Exchange relationships are built on the necessity to receive equal value. Friendship doesn’t care.
- Marriage should be the common union of two deeply committed friends. When it is not, it is simply a convenient barter agreement. If your marriage now has the characteristics, however subtle, of a barter exchange, then you must decide to make the other person your best friend – or face the inevitable consequences in #1 above. You can do this. It is not that much different than making any other person a friend. But to do this you must stop counting! If you find that you are acting in ways that would not promote friendship with anyone else, you must stop doing what you are doing no matter what the cost. In the end, all that you give up is seeking your own ends – and of what value is that if you end up alone?
- Real marriage is commitment, not love. Love (not romance) comes as a result of a lifetime commitment. Love is the end of marriage, not the beginning. Love must be developed, nurtured, cultivated for a long, long time before one day you look around and say, “I guess that’s what it means to love her (him).” Love is longevity. Romance is fireworks. And fireworks explode into nothing but the dark night.
It seems to me that if we really believe God is love, we must account for patience as an essential quality of love. Just as God is incredibly patient with us, just as He continues to love us while we flounder and fail, in the end, we discover that what it meant for God to love us through all our mess is what love really is—and we are called to do the same. To stick with it. To wait until the end before we know for sure.
Looking for true love is a lifetime involvement.
Anyway, that’s what it seems like to me.
Topical Index: loved, life, friendship, 1 John 4:16
Skip, thank you for re-publishing this–so beautiful, so powerful and so important.
I have never commented here before, but this so struck a chord with me. Yesterday was our 45th Wedding Anniversary. Our life together has gotten better and better over the years. I realised awhile back how deeply I love this man, with a love only God could give. I would not call our life easy, and Yet it has been. There have been many times of sorrow, grief and difficulty and Yet it has been filled with happiness and joy . We have not always liked each other, but we have always been committed to each other. We have a severely disabled daughter and I think she has been the glue that at times has held us together especially during the really rough times . We are as committed to her as we are to each other. Our God is a Faithful God and He honors Faithfulness. He is a GOOD GOD. He has blessed us with 4 children, 3 children that have married into our family and 8 precious grandsons. We are Blessed Beyond Measure. Thankyou for letting me share this.
Commitment. Love never never lets go; it never agrees with anything that threatens the relationship. Because love allows for free choice, others can choose themselves out, but love will never agree with that choice.
Romance is about the pheromonal attraction of opposites – people who have differing immune systems, etc are attractive to us because the children born of that union will stand the best chances for survival. I think romance – in the flesh, anyway – was invented by God as part of creation, but romance cannot CARRY a marriage; at best, it can only jumpstart it.
Sex confers biological closeness, but that closeness also brings us within the force field of another’s inner defenses. If that person is not ‘safe’ with themselves; if they are practicing self sabotage and other nonsense of evil based upon lies, then they will practice the same on you. This is dangerous stuff! Animals pick their mates based upon how well they have proven, through the display of peak health, to be able to take care of themselves, because it is hardwired in creation, apparently, that we have the resources to treat others as we treat ourselves. BUT, people have learned how to lie. Women paint and men strut based upon the desire to mask secret shame that reveals our sense of unworthiness, but the truth comes out once we admit someone into the middle of our vulnerable world, which sex is designed to do.
But, then, we have learned to make sex about something else, too! I think women fantasize and men seek porn in an attempt to continue to perpetuate those bandaid motivations that cover that secret shame of ‘unworthiness’ – that inability to take care of ourselves – because sex has a way of revealing our ability or inability to take care of our “flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone”. We can lie in church about our supposed relationship with God that is supposed to be providing that sense of worth and that ability to take proper care of ourselves – and extensions of ourselves – but our spouses live with the truth.
Thanks, Skip. Profoundly true, wise, relevant, and helpful, I hope.
KEEPING A COMMITMENT TO FIND TRUE LOVE IN THE END, ONLY THROUGH PATIENTLY MANAGING AN ENDURING, CARING FRIENDSHIP, NOT A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP, seeking the best of the other even in the context of mutual, periodic, self-serving, inwardly focused narcissism, inequality, double-standards, disagreeing, and injustice.
We must stop the chronic wavering back and forth between denial, bargaining, anger, and depression about the illusion and disillusionment caused by this powerfully seductive LIE of “romantic love”. Romance can be, but it’s neither the ultimate means nor the goal.
Now to PERSISTENTLY PRAY for the help to be WILLING to daily live it out for the long run, to return to progressively making it my unquestionable character, and thus to KNOW HIS GOOD PLEASURE in doing so. Truly He is the only one we can trust WILL notice and be pleased with us for doing the right thing and who will encourage us by letting us know it, and the only one who is ALWAYS WORTHY of such devotion.
“For the One working in you is God—both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” [Php 2:13]
If I am ever asked what reading material I recommend for a couple contemplating marriage it is first and foremost Skip’s seminal work “Guardian Angel”. It would now include this post as well, plus I would add my all time favorite TW from March 5, 2008 entitled: “The Grammar of Love”. Even if you aren’t planning on getting married anytime soon or at all or if you are married but haven’t read this post I highly recommend it, but know in advance it is not only one of his best, but also among his longest.
Finally, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach adds another dimension to this conversation about love and marriage.
“Because while a parent can love their child, they can never choose their child.
And what we all seek in life is not to loved but to be chosen.
Love makes us feel protected. But chosenness make us feel special. To be loved is to be cherished. To be chosen is to be rendered irreplaceable. Love is warm. But chosenness is electrifying.
When it comes to love there can be many. But when it comes to being chosen there can only be one”. I would add: choose wisely and the wise choice would be, as Skip admonishes, is to choose a friend.
This is soo good. I’ll have to add this one with your TW ” Grammar of Love”, on ones I study to get a better understanding on the love of God. I’m single and want to send to all my single friends. Even in the church the pursuit of romantic love has been so spiritualized. I see countless memes, posts on the social media and messages proclaiming God’s going to send you the person just right for YOU, this person that will love YOU, care for YOU, serve YOU, be committed to YOU, all of it so ” me” focused, so self serving, and leaving many single “Christians” impatient with God waiting and praying for Him to send this person and their failures at relationship about the same as those that don’t know God at all.
You’ve got this right, Skip. I know–I’ve lived both sides.
Timely. Truthful. Insightful. Needed.
This should be taught faithfully starting in 1st grade through the highest grade.
Just sent a copy to my daughter.
“It is almost always the result of our unwillingness to seek the best for the other person even at our own expense.”
” In other words, if you have experienced loss in important relationships, there is a very good chance the cause is your own desire to make the relationship meet your needs rather than acting as if the relationship is an opportunity for you to serve in whatever way possible the needs of the other. ”
I love this chapter in 1 John. This chapter is about how we as believers are to treat one another in the community. We love one another because He first loved us. Love does no harm. And if we harm another person, we are not loving them. My trust was violated by another believer. A believer who should have had my back. A believer who has tried to justify their bad behavior.
I wish this person had chosen to seek the best for me at costs to themselves, but that is not the way it played out.
I envy your wife, Skip or any other husband who tries to love their wives in this way.
But we are called to love all people in this way. My fellow believer goes on with their life. I’m attempting to go on with mine.
It has been a huge setback for me. I trusted this person. It was a mistake.