Anonymous Asks (401)

“Why is finding true love so difficult?”

The list of possible answers to this question is lengthy, so I won’t pretend to get to them all. Perhaps we can start with some of the features of our society that work against us when we are in the process of trying to pair up for life.

First on that list is an affliction sometimes called “oneitis”.

Oneitis

I’ve written about oneitis here if you’re interested. It’s the false belief that there is one person on the planet — and only one — who is a perfect match for you, one who completes you and without whom you will never be emotionally fulfilled. Jacob had oneitis, as did Shechem, Samson and Amnon. As I commented in that post, I cannot think of a single historical account in scripture in which a man or woman’s monomania about a potential partner ended well for them.

Mass, programmed oneitis, such as we experience these days, is primarily a product of Hollywood and romance novels, but the error has even worked its way into the believing community. The Bible doesn’t remotely suggest romantic obsession is a good reason to do anything (quite the opposite, in fact), and the sooner we can get our heads around that, the better for our young people.

Of course finding true love is difficult if you think God has hidden some perfect complement out there in the world for you to find. It’s a big world. You may imprudently pass up many good opportunities searching for a soulmate who doesn’t exist.

Unreasonable Expectations

True love is awfully hard to find if your relationship expectations are unbiblical. It’s hard to find anything when you don’t know what you are looking for and why. I mentioned Hollywood and romance novels already, but these do worse things than promote oneitis: they also create the expectation that the crazy, romantic, desperate feelings we experience in courtship ought to carry on indefinitely in marriage and that if they don’t, it’s time to bail. Ask the writers of any rom-com ever. But infatuation and even romance are not synonyms for love. All healthy marriages eventually become strong friendships with the occasional side helping of sex. This is not a bug but a feature. Christian love is affectionate, but its durability comes from commitment to the greatest good of one’s partner over and above our own. That may at times require more sacrifice than immediate personal satisfaction. It certainly doesn’t always give you the feelz.

Christians who don’t recognize marriage is a lifetime of hard work may think there is something wrong with their relationship when in fact it is operating just as God designed it. The problem is not the partner but our own unrealistic expectations. If you set your bar where the Bible sets it, you should not have that problem. Scripture teaches us to be content with what the Lord has given us, not to always be searching for something more exciting or emotionally fulfilling.

Premarital Sexual Experience

Sex prior to marriage is a sin with a consequence rarely considered: it changes the way a person thinks about sex and relationships and the way he or she enjoys them. Intimacies experienced with other people cannot be unexperienced. Sexually immoral people carry their acquired knowledge, fears, eroded trust, changed preferences and default assumptions about others around with them in perpetuity. There is no worse possible foundation for a Christian marriage than a whole pile of sexual experiences with a number of different people, even if these seemed meaningful at the time.

Sexual experience complicates married life. It makes any search for true love extra difficult by creating expectations nobody can meet. A man or a woman who has had sex prior to marriage with three, five, ten or twenty partners creates in his or her mind an opposite-sex ideal that is an amalgam of the best features of everyone with whom they have been intimate, an impossible cocktail of conflicting personal qualities never present side-by-side in a single human being. When the experiences have all ended badly, it leads to fear of rejection so powerful that those gripped by it will often pre-emptively destroy a good relationship, believing it is doomed at some point anyway.

A history of failed relationships also ruins trust, without which no marriage can succeed. More on this subject here and here.

Endless Temptation

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that we live in a day when sexual temptation is as prevalent as at any time in history, perhaps more so. Every teen with a cellphone has perpetual access to streaming porn, something with which even debased old Solomon never struggled. If you learn to expect married sex to be like pixilated sex, plan on being deeply disappointed. Also, plan on being a deep disappointment to your partner.

In times past, women also had a certain level of protection under the roofs of their fathers and husbands. They did not make up more than 50% of students in university or co-workers in any business as they do today. Our culture puts unmarried men and women, believers and non-believers, side by side in all its institutions, creating daily temptations for young Christians looking for a partner. Settling for an unbeliever never leads to true love, be sure of that. Our culture also puts married believers and non-believers of both sexes side by side for their entire married lives, creating endless temptation to adultery the moment any existing partnership hits a rocky patch, and sometimes even when it doesn’t.

Moreover, even when an unexpected and inappropriate affair of the heart outside the home doesn’t end in sexual misadventure, it’s usually enough to leach the joy from your other relationship. No “true love” in that.

Competition and Limited Opportunity

Let’s be frank, the Christian community gives teens and twenty-somethings limited opportunity to pair up with a godly Christian partner. If we are searching for true love biblically, we are reducing our potential partners by something in the order of 80 or 90%. We must walk away not only from the prospect of a love relationship with unbelievers, but also from Christians who do not meet both the Lord’s standards and ours, whatever they may be. Those standards are high, and they do not always seem fair.

Also, it often seems all potential candidates in any given local church are spoken for by somebody with greater charisma or other desirable qualities. Competition further reduces opportunity to find true love. All else being equal, most of us will choose the more physically attractive person over the less. From the little we know of both, Leah was a more spiritual woman than her sister Rachel, but Jacob loved Rachel. Period. That never changed, and Jacob never realized what he had been missing, so Leah never found what she was looking for. Many godly, wonderful Christian men and women born with average looks (or below average) have lived Leah’s experience. That’s not their fault, but it’s reality.

It’s too bad, really, because looks don’t last. Good character is far more enduring.

The Inevitability of Change

Here’s something else that often doesn’t last: personality. Someone once observed that men marry women with the hope they will never change, while women marry men expecting to improve them. Both will inevitably be disappointed.

All partners eventually change in some respects, but usually not in the ways we might hope or desire. No woman goes into marriage hoping her husband loses his hair. No man goes into marriage eagerly awaiting the day his wife starts to look matronly. Moreover, even Christians find life sobers us up over time. I was just reading an article on menopause. Hormonal changes can seriously affect a woman’s level of physical attraction to her husband. That’s something both men and women in Christian marriages have to learn to deal with, but it certainly makes “true love” more difficult if you don’t have realistic expectation of what that means and don’t recognize the scriptural teaching that a husband’s body belongs to his wife and vice-versa. There’s little more discouraging than one’s partner of many years declaring she just doesn’t feel like doing that anymore.

Moreover, there’s a reason the marriage vows have the line in them about “in sickness and in health”. Almost every love match runs into that test at some point. Whatever you signed up for when you took your vows, chances are life will throw you a curve down the road. This too is a challenge for enduring love.

Only in Christ

We could say a great deal more on this subject. It’s a sad fact that many Christians never find true love with another human being in this life. Not everyone makes good choices. That means loneliness is a problem both married and single believers experience in great numbers.

So why is finding true love so difficult? Maybe it’s as simple as this: we are fallen people in a fallen world. Almost every relationship I’ve had in this life has let me down in ways or big or small. The Lord never has. When I was much younger, people who pointed that out irritated the heck out of me with it, but as I’ve aged I’ve come to discover it’s no trite evangelical cliché. Only in Christ can we find true love. I’m quite sure we’ll also find it in our brothers and sisters in eternity, but whatever is genuine about that love will also be derivative rather than original.

That’s also a fact in time. In the end, all love comes from him. Even a Christian marriage is a mere reflection of true love, not the end game for relationships.