Love, love me do...

I managed to bypass Valentine’s Day quite well, helped by the fact that Trev and I were pretty hopeless at remembering it and he rather too often had a meeting on February 14.

It did set me thinking though about the profound lie that has infiltrated our culture - that the happy ending is romantic love.

Actually, the happy ending is Jesus.

Yet practically every movie and song declare that the way to contentment is sex or romance. 

I am still grieving Trevor because we loved deeply. But I remember walking along the tow-path with him years ago and seeing a commemorative bench that said, “You were my everything”. I said to Trev, “You aren’t my everything and I definitely don’t want to be your everything.”  Far too much pressure.

Romance can become an idol that enslaves its worshippers with fear and shame. Those in relationships fear losing them means losing everything. Single people too often feel a failure. That’s viciously wrong.

I heard last week that 39% of the population are single. Put together with the statistic that over half of relationships fail, then surely we will be a devastatingly discontented society if we think that the only way to fulfilment is romantic love. The lives of Jesus and Paul and countless others say otherwise.

All of which tells us that there is a bigger conversation to be had about loneliness and how we learn to deeply love one another beyond the nuclear family in ways that bring heaven down to earth. After all, there’s no marriage in heaven.

The point is not that romantic love is wrong. The utter joy of the bridegroom walking up the aisle is part of a sacrament that reveals how much God adores us. But earthly romance isn’t “the answer”. The truth is that all our loves: parent/child, husband/wife, brother/sister, artist/creation – all of them are to be treasured as an insight, a pointer to the enfolding, tender, passionate, faithful, delighting love of God. That love is the only place where our deepest longings are fulfilled.

The one who is love is the source and the end of it all. The arrow of all our earthly loves points to him and he waits with open arms.