Friday, May 28, 2004
Romantic Love and Modern Life
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I Corinthians 13:4-7
I was discussing the nature of love as we perceive it on another blog and came to some insights. We were discussing how our culture really and truly glorifies romantic love, a concept that crept in at the end of the 18th century in part through the loosening of old ideas that came along with the Enlightenement and as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality and logic over emotion.
We see this played out especially in things like romantic comedies. A good example is the movie Cousins. The movie takes most of its action at or around several weddings.The two leading people involved are caught up in unhappy, unfulfilling marriages, with partners who cheat on them (for a movie set at marriage receptions, it deals a whole lot with unfaithfulness!) and in the end, the leading couple leave their spouses, and marry each other, and literally sail off into the sunset on their honeymoon sailboat cruise.
I realized after I saw that, how hoodwinked we are! I should not be feeling so good about their coming together. This movie trashes a whole lot in the name of romantic fulfillment - honesty, faithfulness, a willingness to live up to committments. All in the name of Love. Leave your spouse, break up your family, dump all the vowed obligations you took on, all of this in the name of Love, as if Love excuses irrational bad behavior. It took a while for Western culture to reach this point. Even Jane Eyre, perhaps one of the great romantic heroines, had the good taste to run away when her lover turned out to have a crazy wife tucked away, and did not come back until after the woman's death.
So what type of love should we really be talking about?
Asan older woman, long after I had declared my spinsterhood, I fell heads over heels deeply and romantically in love with my husband, who was a widower with two children (surprised the heck out of me...I went to visit him (he lived 2000 miles from where I did) and got tremendously, classically lovesick from the separation...he proposed the next day, so maybe he felt it too!). But our love is not simply built upon that experience, but also the experience of our intimacy, and our committment to each other and to God, and to the kids, and to coping and dealing with life. It opened a whole world of love up to me that I had heard about, but would have never experienced without marrying. The willingness to do for another because I love him, rather than telling him to do it for himself because it's an inconvenience. The bonding that comes from sleeping in his hospital room during a short stay with a very minor stroke. His coping with my health problems...both of us dealing with the teens through their crises...Love is such a complex web of committment, appreciation, choosing, caring, and shared experience...It's deepened my relationship with God because it's made me see more about how he loves us because of my experience...and it's soo far from teenage crushes that the chasm is amazingly huge...but so often real love starts just there.
But this is not the love our society glorifies...the love which darns socks and deals with last minute calls from the wife to pick up the kid's medicine, that wonders how to pay for the bills and the expense for the prom dance on the same paycheck, being terrified while waiting in a hospital waiting room, snuggling up in the middle of the night against that warm back comforted by the knowledge that your other half is really your other half.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. - Genesis 2:24. And until I experienced this for myself, in a committed marriage, I didn't realize how true this was. This is the love we should be glorifying...not the romantic thrill, but the love that truly bonds. Our culture might be different if we did.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I Corinthians 13:4-7
I was discussing the nature of love as we perceive it on another blog and came to some insights. We were discussing how our culture really and truly glorifies romantic love, a concept that crept in at the end of the 18th century in part through the loosening of old ideas that came along with the Enlightenement and as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality and logic over emotion.
We see this played out especially in things like romantic comedies. A good example is the movie Cousins. The movie takes most of its action at or around several weddings.The two leading people involved are caught up in unhappy, unfulfilling marriages, with partners who cheat on them (for a movie set at marriage receptions, it deals a whole lot with unfaithfulness!) and in the end, the leading couple leave their spouses, and marry each other, and literally sail off into the sunset on their honeymoon sailboat cruise.
I realized after I saw that, how hoodwinked we are! I should not be feeling so good about their coming together. This movie trashes a whole lot in the name of romantic fulfillment - honesty, faithfulness, a willingness to live up to committments. All in the name of Love. Leave your spouse, break up your family, dump all the vowed obligations you took on, all of this in the name of Love, as if Love excuses irrational bad behavior. It took a while for Western culture to reach this point. Even Jane Eyre, perhaps one of the great romantic heroines, had the good taste to run away when her lover turned out to have a crazy wife tucked away, and did not come back until after the woman's death.
So what type of love should we really be talking about?
Asan older woman, long after I had declared my spinsterhood, I fell heads over heels deeply and romantically in love with my husband, who was a widower with two children (surprised the heck out of me...I went to visit him (he lived 2000 miles from where I did) and got tremendously, classically lovesick from the separation...he proposed the next day, so maybe he felt it too!). But our love is not simply built upon that experience, but also the experience of our intimacy, and our committment to each other and to God, and to the kids, and to coping and dealing with life. It opened a whole world of love up to me that I had heard about, but would have never experienced without marrying. The willingness to do for another because I love him, rather than telling him to do it for himself because it's an inconvenience. The bonding that comes from sleeping in his hospital room during a short stay with a very minor stroke. His coping with my health problems...both of us dealing with the teens through their crises...Love is such a complex web of committment, appreciation, choosing, caring, and shared experience...It's deepened my relationship with God because it's made me see more about how he loves us because of my experience...and it's soo far from teenage crushes that the chasm is amazingly huge...but so often real love starts just there.
But this is not the love our society glorifies...the love which darns socks and deals with last minute calls from the wife to pick up the kid's medicine, that wonders how to pay for the bills and the expense for the prom dance on the same paycheck, being terrified while waiting in a hospital waiting room, snuggling up in the middle of the night against that warm back comforted by the knowledge that your other half is really your other half.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. - Genesis 2:24. And until I experienced this for myself, in a committed marriage, I didn't realize how true this was. This is the love we should be glorifying...not the romantic thrill, but the love that truly bonds. Our culture might be different if we did.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
