Hollywood vs Christianity vs...Me?

Greg sat down heavily on the couch, being careful not to spill his drink. His buddy Joey always knew how to throw a great party, but it had been a long week, and Greg needed to relax for a bit. He looked around the room, taking in the people around him. Suddenly he noticed someone he hadn’t seen before. Their eyes met, and it was like a jolt of electricity shot straight through him. Could it be true? Was this young woman ‘the one’? The one he had been waiting for his whole life? It must be…

Sound familiar? This scene, or a variation of such, is one that plays out in movies all the time. The so-called romantic comedies where it is inevitable that love will come to the characters are very popular, as are the action movies where the intrepid hero falls deeply and passionately into bed--I mean love, at the drop of a hat.
However, movies don’t have the stranglehold on this particular fuzzy emotion. If you wait long enough (and it usually isn’t that long of a wait) then those in Christian circles will also spout the same sentiment. It seems no matter where you go, people assume that love is instantaneous and involuntary.
The funny thing is most people, especially Christians, will deny that this is an accurate portrayal of their views on love. “Love requires hard work, devotion, and trust,” they will say. “Love is a, love is a, love is a ve-erb” they’ll sing (thank you DC Talk). They may even quote 1 Corinthians 13 to you (“Love is patient, love is kind…” etc). How can that be instantaneous? And the truth is, what they speak of is the opposite in many ways of the instant gratification that is so often called love in this day and age. Love is more than casual sex, or mindless lust. Love does require action, patience, persistence, and many other worthy nouns and adjectives. So what is my issue?
The problem is, no one seems to actually believe what they are saying, at least not completely. In order to notice, though, you have to be single, which describes me very accurately. These very same people that tell me about the verb-ness of love dispense advice on love that seems contradictory. I will give an example:
Me: I’d like to get married someday.
Them: Well, when the right girl comes along, you’ll know
Or
Them: You just haven’t met The One yet
Or
Them: There’s a girl out their for you.
If you’re a single girl, then I’m sure that you’ve heard the same advice, only with switched genders.
This leads me to wonder: what exactly am I supposed to believe? Any time the subject comes up, I’m given these contradictory messages. Which is it?
Honestly, I’m tired of the advice or ‘words of comfort’ that I get from people, because they don’t really help. In my mind, it’s an issue of limiting God.
As near as I can figure, God has granted humanity free will. We can debate this all day every day, and never get anywhere on that particular subject, so I will tell you that if you don’t believe in free will, then my arguments will not sway you one bit, and I will spare you the need to finish reading this. If you do believe in free will, then I ask that you stick with for a while longer. This free will that God has granted us gives us the freedom to choose for ourselves, rightly or less-than-rightly, the paths we must take in life. Yet I am supposed to believe that I have no choice in love, that God will just take someone and ram their soul into mine in order to create a better super-soul?
I’m not buying it. The God I worship, the God I’m trying to know more every day is a God who, though it so often pains Him, gives us the freedom to choose our way. He doesn’t control us like puppets. I don’t see how, then, He would take this one area of our lives and completely decide for us, even if He does know what is best.
What, then, is the answer? I suppose that since I am single, it might seem odd that I should be speaking so authoritatively on this particular subject, but observation and experience at being single has shown me a few things.
As individuals, free to choose our own course, that means we are free to choose our own loves. This is pretty obvious to me given the number of broken relationships, both within and without the Christian world. People are choosing badly, even the people who meet their soul-mate. There are a number of factors that make people fall out of love: infidelity, boredom, fear, inability to commit, and unwillingness to work hard, among others. But if all it takes to fall in love is to meet ‘the right one’, then these should not be matters of consequence. Yet they are. Obviously, this instant falling in love is not working.
I truly believe that there are many women in the world that I could love and marry and with whom I would be very happy. And I bet there are some among you who are now worried for me. “What’s the point,” you may ask “in marrying anyone if you don’t think they are the only one you could be happy with?” The answer I’d give is one word: change. “Quarters and nickels?” you may reply, confused. I’d sigh and expand on my answer.
As people live their life, they change. I’m taller than I was fifteen years ago (sadly, my feet are the same size. I looked like Ronald MacDonald when I was younger), and there are many experiences I’ve had since then that have shaped my life and my personality. In the same way, everyone around me has changed as well, having growth spurts and experiences of their own. The people we were then are not the people are now, and we will all be different people ten years from now. And each new experience influences who we are and will become. That means people will come and go in our lives who are able to fill our needs at that time, but if we choose not to go down a path with them, then we will change, they will change, and soon you won’t be able to fill each other’s needs.
If I marry a girl, then the girl I could have married ten years later won’t be a problem because the married me will be so significantly different than the single me would have been. And who knows, at any given time, there may be two different girls that could fill my needs. In that case, it comes down to choosing between the two. As a (slightly absurd) example, I’ll direct you to Jerry Seinfeld.
In one of his routines, Jerry speaks of medicine and the different types there are. At one point, he brings up ‘long-lasting’ versus ‘quick-acting’, and muses “do I need to feel good now, or later?” In the same way, you would have to know what needs you want/need to have filled by a significant other in your life. It comes down to you choosing who you want to build a relationship with, and who you don’t want.
All of this sounds so dispassionate and cold. There is so much more to love than just unfeeling choices, but in the same way, there is more to it than mindless sparks. It seems the hardest part is knowing what choices to make. Thank God for, well, God.
For those of you still with me who are worried that I have cut God out of the picture completely, let me reassure you. God is very much a part of the picture, or at least He should be. God knows what’s best for us. It’s just what He does and who He is. In everything we should be looking to Him, asking for guidance. Trust me, it’s going to be pretty good counselling if we choose to accept it. God will guide you to what is best for you right then, and it is up to you if you will choose it or not. There is so much more that could be talked about in this area, again straying into free will territory, as well as predestination and thoughts on the future and that sort of thing. That is a discussion for another day. Today, however, I think it’s best, and also true, to say that God presents us with choices and lets us choose.
Of course, everyone knows someone whose relationship with their ‘significant other’ seems to fly in the face of what I’ve talked about, those people who knew instantly that the person they had just met, even that they had just seen, was the one they were going to marry. I have two things to say to that. First, there are obviously exceptions, or at the very least stretches, to what I have said. Sometimes the Holy Spirit steps in and says “listen up: marry her. That’s the best choice, that’s the right choice, just do it.” But even in that case, you still have to decide to follow that guidance. It’s just an easy choice, like deciding between a thousand lashes with a steel tipped whip or having a brownie. I don’t think I know anyone who wouldn’t choose the brownie. Even if you’re allergic to chocolate, that’s still a better death than the thousand lashes. All right, I’ve slipped into the absurd again, but you get my point. No matter what the choice, you still have to CHOOSE. The second thing I have to say is that it is entirely possible that seeing a person and falling in love instantly and being right could just be a coincidence. That seems unlikely, but I’ve seen enough unlikely things to know that it is possible. Maybe you just got lucky.
I guess this has been a long rant, but it has been building inside of me for a while. I’m just tired of my single-ness being reduced to nothing more than the fact that I haven’t been at the right place at the right time, or worse, that I was there, but just not paying attention. How much would that suck. But if I’m right in saying that once you are in a relationship you have to choose to stay in love, to work out problems and make a conscious choice to continue to love and support even when it is hard, then I’m right in saying that you have to choose who you are going to love in the first place.
To take it one step further, this doesn’t just apply to marriage. Everyone seems so keen on pointing out that there are four different types of love mentioned in the Bible (agape, philadelphia, mushy, and agape light, if memory serves). So that means that it is possible to love people in other ways. Which means saying you love your friends is okay. Therefore, you have to choose your friends and choose to love them. Oddly enough, I will get less challenges for that one than for the entire rant about ‘romantic love’. Oh well, I choose to love those who disagree with me anyway.
Obviously, there is so much more to living a full life, especially a Christian life. This is just one aspect of life, but it is one that seems to be fairly substantial in most people’s lives. I think the hardest part of all is figuring out how to balance this with everything else in love. That is one question I really don’t have any answers for. I guess we’ll all just have to play it by ear.
Incidentally, for those of you curious about our friend Greg from the beginning (scroll back up and refresh your memory if you need to, I can wait), well, things didn’t work out so well. It turns out that the electricity he felt when he saw “her” (Janine, if you must know her name) was actually his cell phone. The battery, it would seem, was starting to misfire due to multiple droppings by the clumsy handed Greg. Unfortunately, it blew up in his pants later that night, after he had been soundly rejected by Janine (who liked Andy, who was interested in Maria, who only had eyes for Sam, who was keen on Sam (who was a girl) who liked Jake…and it goes on like that. Greg has a slightly pathetic group of friends, really). Fortunately for Greg, he wasn’t wearing the pants at the time. Sadly, it was not so fortunate for the gerbil that had crawled into the pants to nest. Better luck next time Greg, and watch out for small rodents in your pants.