Valentine’s Day… I don’t really see the point in waiting for one particular day to declare your undying love for someone, and it’s the worst day of the year to buy someone flowers or take them out for a meal, because so many other people are doing so. And if creativity is a major part of being romantic, then just going with the crowd doesn’t earn you many “romance points”.
But criticising this consumerist hijacking of romance and all the silliest ideas about “twue luv” isn’t what I want to talk about. I’ve been meaning to get around to posting some thoughts on love and relationships since Contagious, where I went to a seminar on “The Cross and relationships”. I’ve not got round to it, but was recently reminded of this by reading a friend’s thoughts on what love is on her blog. And a talk I heard at L’abri sparked off some new thoughts in my mind about the nature of love, and the relationship between love and hope. So I think I’ll write about these things now.
(By the way, just in case anyone tries to psychoanalyse me, or read in coded hints to a loved one into my post, or anything like that, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not supposed to mean anything to anyone more than what it says on the tin – or in the post title!)
My friend mentioned love as “Self sacrifice and enjoying it”, which seems to me to be pretty close. But I think that precise phrasing sounds vaguely masochistic, as if we have to enjoy denying ourselves pleasure. I think John Piper put it well when he said words to the effect that love is “finding your pleasure in the pleasure of your beloved” – it’s not denying ourselves pleasure that’s necessarily virtuous, but giving pleasure to someone else (which may involve denying ourselves certain other pleasures for the right pleasure of generous love).
I think that being “in love” involves daring to hope (that is, daring to desire with expectation of future fulfilment) that the one you love will also love you. I think you stop being in love when you stop hoping for that love to be returned, though you can still choose to love as an action, seeking pleasure in the pleasure of another, even if they don’t reciprocate or even if you don’t feel particularly romantic.
I’ll talk a bit about hope generally, drawing on the lecture by Edith Reitsema given at L’abri on the question “What do we need to have hope?” but developing the ideas myself. Hope can be defined as “desire accompanied by the confident expectation of its fulfilment”. Hope involves daring to desire, daring to expect, daring to wait, and daring to act. It’s a dangerous thing to let yourself desire someone or something, and more dangerous yet to allow your expectations that it could happen be raised. We open ourselves up to the possibility of disappointment, and have to make ourselves vulnerable and dependent on the one we’re hoping in.
But for all the risk, we can have confident hope. For example, the hope of glory in the Christian faith isn’t just wishful thinking, but based on the knowledge of God’s past grace, supremely the historical event of the resurrection. That means that we have good reason to hope God will keep his promises in the future, because he has kept them in the past. And it’s not just our hope in God that can be more than wishful thinking: hope generally can be confident, as our reason and future-orientated faith work together. (What John Piper has to say in his book Future Grace is also coming into my thoughts on these matters – a lot of what he has to say about our relationship with God has relevance for our relationships generally, though of course it doesn’t carry over directly).
A confident hope gives us the grounds and power both for acting and for waiting. Hope gives motivation and good reason to act to work towards the realisation of one’s hope. If I am really confident of my hope, I won’t just sit back and wait for a girl to throw herself at me (and I probably won’t get anywhere if I wait for that to happen!), but can act in the confidence that it is worth doing so and that my actions really will help bring my hope to fruition.
One of the hardest actions for us to take is to choose to wait. Hope shouldn’t make us complacent, but sometimes waiting is the right action for a given moment. If we have a confident hope, then that confidence takes the worry out of waiting. Daring to wait is often a real act of bravery and trust – if I have real hope, confident hope, then, for example, I can wait faithfully for someone or something.
If hope is longing for what we do not yet see, then does hope cease once we’ve “got the girl” (or guy)? No – the desire and eager expectation for your beloved’s love should continue moment by moment. The moment I stop hoping that the one I love also finds pleasure in me is the moment I start taking them for granted. You can still continue to love someone by putting them first without this hope, but it seems to me that the romance of being “in love” depends on the hope of their continued pleasure in you, at least from my admittedly limited experience!
That’s perhaps a bit airy-fairy and impractical, but I’ve written an article for the Quench Debate page against dating as it is commonly practiced which has some more practical thoughts on how we should “do relationships”, which I’ll post on here in a few days.
