love rant

So, I don't get it - why are so many people obsessed with love? Single people wanting "to be in a relationship". Married/engaged/dating people feeling sorry for those poor single people and their lonely and (assumedly) empty lives. "Chick flicks", romance novels and romantic comedies, dating websites and how-to guides. Our world seems obsessed with finding (romantic) love and its logical conclusion: happily ever after. No matter how much weight there is in contrary evidence that "happily ever after" at least is far from guaranteed.

Yet we still chase after it, devoutly believing that when I find love "it will be forever" and nothing will be able to keep us apart. Girls and young women spend hours planning weddings to men who are either oblivious or not yet on the scene, but they don't seem to care. Perhaps they are in love with the dream of love rather than the actual person (or perspective mate). The flowers, the white dress, we all know the statistics are against us, but hey I'll still get my perfect dream.

Maybe it's just the place where I'm sitting at the moment, but I find something profoundly disturbing about this love-obsession. Having passed from a place where I would be one of those dreaming white dreams of love through broken dreams and reborn hopes to a whole new outlook on life and, therefore love (or is it love and therefore life?), the love-obsession strikes me as profoundly dangerous, counterproductive, even destructive.

Not that we aren't meant to love - even made to love - but we have made 'love' something it never was. Worse, we have convinced ourselves that finding 'love' is the tantamount to finding 'happiness.' If you are not happy with the one you're with, than obviously it wasn't 'true' love, better go find another one, but what if the goal of life was not to find someone else to 'fulfill' or 'complete' a single life by 'being in a relationship'? What if the goal of life wasn't 'the pursuit of happiness'? What if the love we are really all longing for has little to do with white dresses and happy endings, and everything to do with blood, sweat, tears and heartbreak?

Six years ago, when I was interviewing for a place as a student on a Masters course in Christian counseling, I remember telling the lady, "I hate pain." I may have even added the rider, "I avoid it at all costs." It was the two years in that counseling program that taught me that the cost of avoiding pain was far higher than the cost of experiencing it, but it wasn't until the last two years, year, six months, six weeks that I have come face to face with love. Only this is a love I never knew existed. This is a love that has broken and emptied me. This is a love that has cost me so dearly, I have nothing left to pay, and still I feel pain.

But the thing that I find the most jarring about this experience is that I have chosen the experience of pain. I have chosen to give love to others, regardless of the cost to me. There's no romance involved, no white dress, no happy ending. This is brothers and sisters in Christ struggling together in a hard world, bearing one another's burdens and seeking to fulfill the law of Christ. This is the true face of the 'happily ever after' love that I was searching for as a girl. Not chaste kissess and shy confessions ending in a happy middle class life, but down and dirty life in the trenches, up to your elbows in the muck and mess, giving of self, bearing the pain of others, making that choice so that my pain, my suffering, my doubt, my loneliness might, in some way, help those I love to find freedom and fullness of life.

Similarly, love is willingness to share my own burdens with others, allowing them to be hurt by my pain, and allowing myself to be healed by their self-giving. There is reciprocity there, mutual vulnerability, sharing out of the burdens so that the load may be lightened.

And then I think of Jesus. And I remember the words of Paul who wished to "know Christ, the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, being made like him in his death and so, somehow, to attain the ressurection from the dead." I remember reading these words more than four years ago, sitting on a table before a counseling lab, and suddenly feeling and meaning them in a way I never had before, but it wasn't until I recently found myself giving love to another out of my own emptiness and pain, giving, in fact, of resources I manifestly didn't have, that I began to wonder if the wish to share in Christ's sufferings might have been a bit foolhardy. Perhaps this is a way to grow in the likeness of Christ, a way to share in bringing the world closer to God, but still I can't help by point out that we have seriously missed the point somewhere in our understanding of "love".