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Can you help who you fall in love with? Can you be sure of marrying the right person?
A few years ago I wrote a short comment about a news article from the time and entitled the post ‘You can’t help who you fall in love with?’. Since writing it, it has become one of my most read posts. For some time, I’ve been meaning to flesh it out a little, and while the toddler is asleep it seems like a good opportunity…
Last week, Relevant magazine posted an extract from Tim Keller’s upcoming book on marriage, entitled ‘You never marry the right person’. Each marriage, he claims is a matter of making choices, and compromising.
We are lured into thinking that we will find a soul mate, another half, or someone to complete us. The movie Jerry Maguire brought is the phrase ‘You complete me’ which is a nice sentiment but it is untrue. This idea that a partner should bring us the ultimate in self-fulfillment comes from self-first consumer culture that we live in. We are used to self-help books, we are brought up to be fiercely independent, and we are used to doing things and buying things that fulfil us.
Yet when we apply this thinking to marriage, dating and partners we are on dangerous ground. The thinking is that love should not be hard, it should come naturally if you are truly soul-mates.
Tim Keller’s response is
“Why believe that? Would someone who wants to play professional baseball say, ‘It shouldn’t be so hard to hit a fastball’? Would someone who wants to write the greatest American novel of her generation say, ‘It shouldn’t be hard to create believable characters and compelling narrative’?
When one flawed human being relies on another flawed human being to complete him or her, it is never going to be completely straight forward. We are all less than perfect in different ways and we are never going to find a perfect partner to fill in the gaps of our own deficiencies.
The Bible talks about marriage as being, one flesh. The married couple are a single unit, but this is a unity that has to be worked at in relationship with God.
Nowhere in the Bible is love seen as a self-completing thing. It is always spoken about in relation to others – God, marriage partner, family, church and society. Love is not self-serving but others-centric. Love is a verb. The grand list of loving characteristics of 1 Cor 13 (written to a church, not a couple) are all acts of the will which involve putting the other before yourself – love is patient, kind, not self seeking etc. They point towards the character of God, who supremely demonstrated this love in Jesus. As we choose to love, and are given the power to do so by God, we identify with God’s character.
So, what do you do if you are attracted to someone?
You will then need to decide what to do with that attraction. Attraction doesn’t need to lead to love.
Attraction, I believe, can’t be helped. We are attracted to all kinds of different people. Some may simply be people who happen to be nice to look at. For others it is an aspect of their character that appeals to us. Often we are attracted by characteristics that we don’t have, or that we’d like to get better at.
Before acting on this attraction, it is always worth asking whether this person would be a good match for me. Are they a nice person, fun to be around, interesting? Do they have some of the same values that you have, such as attitudes to money, family, faith? These are all things that would help any potential relationship go more smoothly. In these cases, the attraction can be helpful and we may decide to pursue it.
Sometimes, pursuing the attraction is not a good idea. What if the person is unavailable to you such as they are married already? For example, if a married man is attracted to another woman (this itself is not a crime) but he must choose what to do with that attraction. He may want to put in boundaries to remove or reduce the temptation, for the benefit of his marriage. He may avoid that woman and make sure he is never alone with her. Or if he has to meet her and part of his job or something, he could always meet in a public place. He could also confide and be accountable to someone else. There are many ways to reduce the temptation that would inevitably destroy his marriage, and avoid the attraction turning into something else. Each little step is a choice. It is worth asking the opinion of those who are close to you, and who know you the best.
There may be other reasons why the person is not available to you – for example, parental pressure or culture or distance. These situations can be emotionally painful. I remember falling for a person of another faith. In hindsight, it was absolutely right for s not to get together, but it was hard at the time. Is the barrier a good or necessary one? Your family may disagree for good reasons, or not. You will need to discern this. You may need to walk away and consciously choose not to pursue the attraction any further.
But it is always crucial to remember that the other person in a relationship is not there to complete or fulfil the other. Each is there to learn to love one-another in ways that they could not have imagined at the outset of the relationship.
Keller again:
The hard times of marriage drive us to experience more of this transforming love of God. But a good marriage will also be a place where we experience more of this kind of transforming love at a human level.
We never marry the right person. Love is a verb. Love is a choice
Like this:
Please don’t read this book…
The point of joining a bookgroup is to read stuff that you may not usually read, getting the ideas of others to broaden your reading list and maybe even some ideas for other authors to investigate. The description of the book 16 Lighthouse Road by Debbie Macomber had a lot of potential. A county court judge, Olivia Lockhart, refuses a young couple a divorce on the grounds that they had had everything against them and hadn’t had the chance to try to make it work. The young couple had a miscarriage whilst the husband was away with the Navy and unable to return home. By the time he did returned it seemed too late.
What I expected was a decent exploration of the nature of marriage with deep well-rounded characters who investigated their own flaws and had a thoughtful sense of development. I was wrong.
There are a number of things wrong with this book. Firstly, it is not written particularly well. Even from the title, I was expecting much of the setting of the book to be based in 16 Lighthouse road, perhaps with a description of the house and area and history of what that house meant to those that live there. This didn’t happen. It seems that the title is simply a mechanism to create a series of books (There is a sequel based around one of the characters in this book called 104 Rosewood Lane).
More importantly, much of the dialogue is clichéd and the narrator’s description of the characters’ internal voices is poor – particularly when writing from the point of view of the male characters. They don’t think like men think. There are too many occasions when the author goes off on a pointless tangent for a couple of paragraphs for no apparent reason.
There are several storylines in the book, most of which involve a romance. Cecilia and Ian are the couple who were denied a divorce. After the denial of divorce there is a dinner meeting to discuss the way forward, which turns into a passionate evening followed by a miscommunication, a refusal to see each other, and act of kindness, a return to sea, an accident on the aircraft carrier and some very clichéd exchanges of letters. It all ends with the predictable reconciliation.
The rest of the action surrounds Olivia and her friends and family. The local newspaper editor (new in town) hears about what she did, writes an article about her and takes a fancy to her. They have an on-off-on again romance punctuated by more miscommunication and an all-too-easy coming together.
Olivia’s daughter Justine is the former high school valedictorian and current local bank manager. Justine’s twin brother had died in an accident as a teenager. Her ten-year high school reunion is due, and she is nominated to serve on the organising committee. This brings her into contact with her brother’s former best friend and former high-school football star, Seth. He is currently a fisherman who spends a lot of time in Alaska and lives on a boat. There is the inevitable attraction, unspent passion and confusion. Justine continually changes her mind about whether to date Seth or stick in her current unfulfilling relationship with Warren, a wealthy man 20 years her senior who likes a the company of younger ladies. We all know she is going to end up with Seth. Warren detects the attraction and ups the ante by proposing. Debbie Macomber does her best to make this process interesting but is all reads like teenage indecision about who to go out with. The book ends with a shotgun marriage (to Seth) which didn’t seem true to Justine’s character.
There is a subplot involving Charlotte, Olivia’s mother, who tries to untangle a mystery left by a former inhabitant of a care home she used to work in. This man turns out to be Tom Houston, former 1950’s star of a cowboy show who had neglected his family when he was famous. He moved to Cedar Cove to be closer to his only remaining family – a grandchild who didn’t want to know him.
The other major storyline involved Grace, Olivia’s best friend. Her husband mysteriously disappears near the beginning of the book. He walks out on her, leaving his clothes, car and everything. This storyline isn’t really ever finished, to leave room for the next book.
One of the frustrating things about the book is the number of times characters change their minds about people or things without much explanation. The reader is left in dismay as yet another plot twist is due to a character refusing to communicate or even think about what might be best for them. I’m not saying that people always think through their decisions, but real life people are deeper and more complex than that, and the repetitiveness in the book was irritating.
Despite lots of broken relationships in the book, you do get the feeling that Macomber considers marriage and commitment to be important, and that relationships can be worked out, but in the book, the twists and turns of marriage seem to be things that happen to you, rather than things you might proactively work towards. All the major relationship developments occur as a result of something unforeseen – a child’s death, and explosion on the aircraft carrier, a chance meeting in a bar, a husband inexplicably leaving after 25 years of marriage.
The bedrock of marriage is mutual effort and trust, a willingness to work at love, discuss differences, and offer forgiveness. It involves real, deep, open communication, understanding the challenges your partner might face and seeking to support one another through them. A husband must realise how his wife receives love and should seek to show it in that way. In many ways, husband and wife become two individuals within a single unit in what they hope for and what their values are. Macomber’s characters were all about receiving love and nothing more.
There is only one relationship in the book that gets sorted out, and this does so through an exchange of letters (again, letters which, in the way they are written, do not ring true). It is a shame that Macomber didn’t take the opportunity in this storyline to investigate more deeply the grief that comes from miscarriage and the real struggles that might be involved in rebuilding trust in a marriage. It all proved to be too easy and predictable.
It is holiday chick-lit fluff, and nothing more.
Daily Mail: Premarital Abstinence leads to better marriages
Read the whole article – Want the secret to a happy marriage? Don’t have sex before the wedding | Mail Online.
It shouldn’t be surprising that those who wait put less emphasis on the physical side of the relationship at the beginning and more time learning how to communicate and making stable foundations for the marriage. Love is a verb and we have to learn how to do it well.
H/T Peter Ould
You can’t help who you fall in love with
BBC News are carrying an article about a former prison officer, Kelly-Anne McDade, who has just been sentenced to jail time for two things. She had a sexual relationship with a male inmate, resulting in her getting pregnant, and she also smuggled in mobile phones for use by inmates.
I’m not going to probe deeply into the case, but what struck me was the excuse/defense that her solicitor was trying to put forward.
Richard Germain, defending McDade, told the court: “There is no doubt it was an inappropriate relationship, but Ms McDade would say ‘You can’t help who you fall in love with’.”
via BBC NEWS | England | Beds/Bucks/Herts | Inmate-sex prison officer jailed.
This is a myth. You can help who you fall in love with. Perhaps you can’t help who you find attractive, but love is a completely different thing. Love is not an uncontrollable emotion. Once the impulses of attraction come along, we choose whether to act on them. We choose whether to show love to someone else. There certainly are feelings associated with love, but these feelings themselves are not love. They are merely associated with it. Over all, love is a choice.
If we are attracted to somebody, it doesn’t mean we have to love them. For example, if a married man is attracted to another woman (this itself is not a crime) but he must choose what to do with that attraction. Hopefully he will put in boundaries to remove or reduce the temptation, for the benefit of his marriage. He may avoid that woman and make sure he is never alone with her. Or if he has to meet her and part of his job or something, he could always meet in a public place. He could also confide and be accountable to someone else. There are many ways to reduce the temptation that would inevitably destroy his marriage, and avoid the attraction turning into something else. Each little step is a choice.
We can help who we fall in love with and it is the result of hundreds of little choices.
Update 12/01/12: There is now a more detailed post on the subject here.
Fight for your love.
Celebrity gossip doesn’t usually interest me but I was listening to the radio a couple of days ago and became intrigued by the new song from Cheryl Cole. I’m not usually a fan of hers, I don’t have any of her singles or albums and haven’t really paid her that much attention. But I had picked up snippets from her life so far.
For example, I knew that Cheryl was born and brought up not to far from where I was brought up… just outside Newcastle. But I also knew she lived in an area that had a lot of problems with high rates of crime, addictions, teenage pregnancy, poor school attendance, and a high proportion of single parents. I knew that Cheryl didn’t have a good start in life.
I also knew that she managed to get on a TV talent show – Pop-Stars:The Rivals in 2003, which she won with the group Girls Aloud which instantly had a number one hit with Sound of the Underground. She now has a solo career and has become a judge on the X-Factor.
I was also aware that Cheryl was married to another famous person, the Chelsea footballer Ashley Cole. He proposed in 2005 and they were married in a lavish wedding ceremony in 2006, with exclusive photos carried by OK! magazine.
I had also heard, unfortunately, that Ashley was not a nice boy. I didn’t really like him anyway because he played for Chelsea. But, it was reported, back in 2008, that Ashley had been unfaithful to Cheryl. He had allegedly had an affair with a hairdresser called Aimee and with a model. So, after that Cheryl and Ashley had a brief separation during which, apparently, Ashley apologised and supposedly grovelled to Cheryl to take him back…which she did. Ashley wronged Cheryl but she was willing to forgive him and they are now back together.
So, no, I don’t really follow her life, but this is what I’d picked up.
Now, what caught my attention was the song that was on the radio. It was a love song, but a love song with a difference. It’s called, Fight for this Love, and it’s as if all of Cheryl’s experiences of her life, and her relationship with Ashley Cole, have been rolled up into this song.
The song recognises that in relationships, things aren’t always rosy
“Now everyday aint gon´ be no picnic
Love aint no walk in the park“
It recognises that relationships are difficult, as in her case when her husband has wronged her. But even in relationships where there is no unfaithfulness, the song recognises that there’ll be good days when the feelings of love are wonderful, and there will be bad days when you have to muster up every ounce of energy that you have to forgive the other one.
Anything that´s worth having
Is sure enough worth fighting for
Quitting’s out of the question
When it gets tough gotta fight some more
We gotta fight fight fight fight fight for this love
Relationships are not easy, but they are worth sticking at and working at. Because it is in the forgiving, the discussing, the working together, and the thinking of the other person that the relationship is deepened. As each partner recognises their failings and comes to the other in humility, the sense of dependance and consequently, the marriage relationship is deepened. A deep long lasting relationship needs to be worked at.
When we think about it, that’s true of all the good things in life, why should marriage be ay different? If we want the best things from life, we need to commit to them and work at them. If we want to have a good career, we need to commit to that goal, and work towards it. If we want to play a musical instrument, we need to practice. Want to be good at sport, we need to work at our skills. Apparently David Beckham used to stay back a long time after training was over just practising taking free kicks.
Likewise, if want a good, long-lasting, deep relationship we must be prepared to prioritise it and put into place good practices: spending quality time with each other, doing kind acts for each other, buying gifts that show appreciation every so often. And, most importantly, being prepared to forgive a when there is genuine repentance.
All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty. (Prov 14:23)
War and Peace
Having finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace about a week ago, here are some thoughts. I think it is almost impossible to fully review a book this big, but here are some of my reflections anyway.
1) Tolstoy has a funny relationship with history. Writing about 5 years after the events described in the book (Napoleons invasion into Russia in 1812), Tolstoy is aware of what the historians have written on the matter. He brings this into his descriptions of the course of the war but also a more down to earth approach based on his experiences serving in the Russian army. Historians like to explain things in terms of orders, plans and strategies of generals and admirals. His problem with that is that generals and admirals are often a long way from the battle lines, so when their strategies are not implemented, it is difficult to respond to the battle play-by-play. Tolstoy prefers to use other forces such as the spirit of the troops, the ideas of the day, the on the ground reactions of the individual army units. All of this combines to produce events of war that no-one is really directing. Tolstoy takes great pleasure in describing how Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, the commander in chief of the Russian Army, defied all the other general’s wishes by stepping back in retreat. This allowed the French army, which was a long way from home, had suffered heavy losses at the battle of Borodino, and crucially, did not know how to deal with the Russian cold, to effectively defeat themselves. This, Tolstoy thinks, was the work of a master who read all the signs and spirit of the war. Tolstoy seemed to think that the French were always going to defeat themselves in this war, and Kutuzov had the courage and the foresight to enable them to do it for him without risking more of his own soldiers than needed.
Tolstoy’s final chapter (Epilogue II!) is an essay on what are the forces that drive nations to war? What is power and how is it appropriated and allowed to flourish by the people. His conclusion is complex, but he remarks that nations do not go to war simply because of an Emperor’s will. He implies that the ancients might have got it right when they attributed this kind of thing to the outworking and sovereignty of God. It is only relatively recently that this has failed to be a good enough answer.
2) Tolstoy’s characters are complex, well rounded and deep. The central character, Pierre, is portrayed as a likeable buffoon who is lumbering through life trying to find truth and meaning and something he enjoys, and he always seems dissatified with the society of nobility that he is a part of. To him, it seems shallow (and is epitomised in his wife, Helene, who is only interested in social advancement). Pierre’s search for truth leads him to join the Freemasons, to get involved in social improvement for his peasant labourers, to try and make a mark on history buy coming up with a ridiculous plan to assassinate Napoleon. In the end he finds it is the simple things of like that make it worthwhile and fulfilling – having one’s personal needs met and being thankful to God for it, having a deep, true, and real relationships including a secure marriage relationship (in his second marriage after his first wife, Helene, dies), and in his family. For Tolstoy, meaning is as simple as this. (If Pierre had discovered this sooner, the book would be shorter)
3) The book is full of examples of how to and how not to do life. As in one of Tolstoy’s other books, Anna Karenina, it is stability, faithfulness and sense that are promoted. The continual lust for money, power, social advancement are all found to be empty, unfulfilling, and the path to destruction.
For the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He holds victory in store for the upright, he is a shield to those whose walk is blameless, for he guards the course of the just and protects the way of his faithful ones.
Then you will understand what is right and just and fair—every good path. For wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will protect you, and understanding will guard you.
Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who leave the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways. (Prov 2:6-11)
Fred, Dalila and an internet proposal
So, Fred wants to marry Dalila, so what does he do? Start a viral internet and social media campaign to persuade her (Twitter #SayYesD, http://www.sheknows.com/articles/810383.htm). Aparrently Dalila has difficulty making decisions!
What I like about this:
1. Marriage – it is great and it shows commitment and love. Spending the rest of your like with someone isn’t easy but is very regarding with a bit of dedication and hard work. People wanting to get married and commit to another person wholeheartedly should be encouraged and applauded.
2. Who one married used to be a question for the whole family, maybe even the wider community. Getting the opinion of friends and family on whether you have made a good choice is an excellent idea.
3. Fred has thought long and hard about what he likes about Dalila. This is some sort of love letter expressing his feelings.
What I don’t like about this:
1. Come on Fred – you don’t need a gimmick or a jumbo tron. Just take her somewhere nice and ask her – to her face.
2. We all know that popular opinion can be fickle, untrustworthy and ridiculous (look at Big Brother and a host of other reality TV programmes). Get advice from people you trust, not a random collection of strangers.
3. The medium is the message – we are used to seeing advertisements for things that we don’t need or that promise more than they can deliver. Is Fred reducing marriage to the consumerist level?
3. If she reallys needs this much persuading, perhaps it is not a good idea to get married. Perhaps she needs time not pestering.
My Advice:
Dalila – Only say yes if you actually love him. Get advice from close friends and family, not internet strangers (!).
Herman Oeser on marriage
“Those who want to become happy should not marry. The important thing is to make the other happy. – Those who want to be understood should not marry. The important thing is to understand one’s partner.”
Herman Oeser quoted in Walter Trobisch’s ‘I Married You’.
Love and Marriage
Every week I read the postsecret blog – an art project of postcards that people send in revealling their deepest secrets. This is my favourite.
Love is not accidental, it is not random, it is not by fate or by chance. It is intentional, an act of the will as well as the heart. I feel so happy for whoever sent this.
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. (1 Cor 13:4-7, NLT)
Freedom
At what point does our love of freedom dissolve into individualistic self-centredness with little regard for the extended family and culture?
Don Carson in For the Love of God reflecting on restrictions on who people can marry in ancient Israel (Numbers 36) and their implications for today’s culture.
