This past year in the area where I live, I have witnessed the downfall of three marriages in which at least one partner in the marriage claimed to be Christian. Now I'm not here to debate whether any of these people were in fact really "Christian", but it was a tough time for my wife and I to see such marital disintegration so close to home. I personally was frustrated at how people claiming to be Christian could have allowed their most important earthly relationship to slip away to the point where it seemed beyond recovery, but then I realized that this can happen to anyone - even me. Nevertheless, I was bothered by this because I reasoned that divorce should never happen amongst Christians, yet it's sad but true that one of the most widely known statistics about divorce is that it happens about as often inside the body of Christ as it does outside. And so, being the inquisitive type, I struggled to wonder why.
Then one day this past summer I was listening to a song when suddenly the thought leapt to mind about how nearly all "love" songs seem fall into one of the two camps mentioned above: when a person falls in "love" and when a person falls out of "love". 'Why do songs never seem to be written from the standpoint of a happily married couple?' I wondered. As I thought more about this, I realized that not just songs but books, plays, movies, TV shows, etc. all seem to focus exclusively on these two "love" situations as well.
Moving deeper with these thoughts, I began to think about how these types of media form the basis of our pop culture, and how this in turn has such a massive influence on our society's understanding of love. And then suddenly it struck me about why Christian marriages are just as likely to fail as non-Christian ones.
I remember a breakthrough in my understanding of love while listening to a Focus On The Family radio broadcast a few years back, hosted by Dr. James Dobson. From that day forward, what I learned helped me to understand so much about why relationships survive and fail, and hopefully my summation of this understanding can help you as well.
Basically, Dobson explained that the giddy, floating-on-air kind of feelings the first year or two after meeting that special someone is not love, but rather "infatuation" or "lust". Any of you who've watched Bambi might remember the term "twitterpated" being used to describe these feelings. The saying "Love is blind" was coined, in my opinion, by someone who did not understand what true love really is; this person was instead referring to a state of infatuation. At a marriage seminar last fall, one of the speakers mentioned how these feelings have been scientifically discovered to be the result of a chemical release from the brain, and it takes one to two years for its euphoric effect to wear off. This is the point where people claim that they have "fallen out of love", failing to realize that they had actually not been in love in the first place.
Anyhow, true "love", continued Dobson, is NOT blind, but rather it's the kind where you choose or decide to love someone long after the honeymoon no matter how they look or act. Our world gets the two terms "infatuation" and "love" reversed/mixed up. In actuality, infatuation is a self-serving emotion but love is a selfless choice or decision. Love, in its truest sense, is not a noun but a verb - it requires action.
So while considering this misunderstanding of love, I also considered how so many modern Christians fail to block out the influences of pop culture. Our Lord warned us to basically be in the world but not of the world, yet we so readily listen to the same songs, read the same books, and watch the same visual media as the non-Christian "world". And in so doing we form the same perceptions of love (among other things) as the world does.
So when I mentioned before how I was suddenly struck about why Christian marriages are just as likely to fail as non-Christian ones, it meant that the little Christian girl who watched "Cinderella", for example, likely carried some of those fantasy-based misconceptions of love into her marriage with her. And when the chemicals that sparked the euphoric emotions toward her new husband have worn off - what people jokingly refer to as "after the honeymoon" - she begins to wonder if she married the "right person". Now that the chemical-induced "blindness" is gone, she now no longer laughs as much at and is instead more annoyed about his less-than-flattering appearance or behavior issues.
I am absolutely convinced that nearly every divorce in the history of the world has been the result of this misunderstanding of what love really is. The infatuated person is used to having been self-centered to that point in a relationship. That person spends as much time as possible with the person they're infatuated with because s/he wants to fuel the emotions even more, to bring them to even greater heights. Any selfless acts in this regard are usually done so the recipient can do something good back to them that fuels their euphoric emotions even more.
But once the chemicals wear off and the 'honeymoon is over', so to speak, a person has to decide whether they will stick with their spouse through thick and thin because their motivation is no longer chemical. They have to now choose to stick with and support that person, they have to decide to serve the needs of that other person. This action to do so is true love! And when even one person in the relationship decides they want to stick to their self-serving ways of the infatuation period, the relationship starts to disintegrate unless things are realized and action is taken.
Even before I had this understanding of why Christian marriages fail at about the same rate as non-Christian ones, I had observed that every divorce I had analyzed was the result of stubborn selfishness on the part of one or both people in the marriage. Now that I have had this observation confirmed, I hope you can benefit from this understanding if you're wondering 'whether anybody loves anybody anyway'.
I hope to discuss this issue of love from a different angle in a follow-up to this post. Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment