Thoughts on love

Today being Valentines Day my thinking has turned towards love and relationships. For those of you who are married or in a relationship I wish you a Happy Valentines Day; may your love continue to grow as you come to know each other better. To those of you who, like me, are still single I also wish you a Happy Valentines Day; may you come to know the love of Christ even more today and remember that no matter what God loves you more than you can ever know or imagine. God of course also loves those of you in relationships as well.

While it is often hard to walk through life alone it seems that often Valentines Day causes many people to reflect even more on their singleness. So many people want to be in a relationship and for whatever reason aren’t. Either we haven’t met the right person. Or we have had their heart broken and so are weary of taking the next step. Or we have never had a relationship at all and are afraid of what beginning one might mean. Maybe we are afraid of being rejected and so never ask someone we might be interested in to get coffee. Or maybe we just get too busy and simply walk by each other. Whatever the reason it seems that as people get older the pressure to date and get married gets more intense from family, friends, and even self. And with the increase in pressure so does, at least for some, the anxiety. And the questions – “Am I ever going find my lost half?”

Despite all the reasons it has not happened there is the desire to be in a relationship with someone who you can love and who can love you. Someone who will listen to you when you share your feelings and who yearns to share their feelings with you. People desire that person with whom they can sit with in silence and be perfectly comfortable. Someone to raise a family with. Someone to walk through this complicated and confusing thing called life with. Or someone simply to keep warm with on a cold winter night. But even with so many people looking many people are still alone.

This desire for love is of course deeply rooted in all of us. One of the most interesting explanations of it (outside of Scripture of course) is the thought of Plato. In his Symposium he tells the story of how the gods split human beings in two and now life is about searching for your other half and love is connecting. In the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch the song “Origin of Love” tells the same story (below is the clip from the movie):

The part of this song that I have been thinking about recently is the end:

Last time I saw you/We had just split in two/You were looking at me/I was looking at you
You had a way so familiar/But I could not recognize/’Cause you had blood on your face/I had blood in my eyes/But I could swear by your expression/That the pain down in your soul/Was the same as the one down in mine/That’s the pain/That cuts a straight line down through the heart/We call it love…

I think that this is where a lot of people are. We go through life searching for connections, whether romantic or not. With some people we find them and with others we don’t. Or we find one sort of connection and not the other. What most people are longing for however is that connection that they can call love. That connection with their “lost half.”

Until then however what are we to do – especially when it feels like all our feelings are being numbed. When it is hard to be happy and joyful, but equally hard to cry…What do you do when the only feelings you have are anxiety, despair, and general grumpiness…Or simply a numbness…And we may even fear that we will soon forget how to love.

I guess what we do until that year when we can send roses and chocolates to our Valentines we remember first that God loves us passionately. That God loves us so much that we are complete and do not actually need to derive our self worth form whether or not we have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a husband or a wife. We then need to spend time building community with our friends – loving them wholeheartedly. Life is hard but it is always a little easier when you have good friends to go through it with. Community is vitally important and I thank God for the community that I have. Finally, we can pray. We can pray for God to bring us joy in our singleness and we can pray for a relationship. And we can even pray for our future spouse. On days where this matter is at the front of my mind I always feel better when I ask God to give a sense of comfort to the girl that I will one day date and marry – I pray that if she too is worried about her singleness that God will ease her anxiety and give her the same peace and joy in her singleness as God also gives it to me. It might sound a little weird to some people, but it has been meaningful to me. And in it God has brought me peace.

Well, now that I have gotten way too personal for the internet I’ll close. May you find the love you are longing for deep in your soul. May God strengthen your marriage and relationship. May God develop your friends and your community to show you love when you do not feel like you can give or receive it. And may God reveal to us the love that God has for us, so on those days when we feel especially alone we can know that though friends may leave us, though friends may hurt us, though we might not be in a relationship at all, we are loved deeply by God and that will never change.

Finally, for those of you who did not receive one today…