Why Love Will Always Be a Poor Investment. Kurt Armstrong
was seventeen.
In grade three, Becky came to spend a week with my older sister after summer camp ended, and she fell in love with me. She told my sister she thought I was a “totally gorgeous hunk of a babe,” and that she’d go out with me whenever I was ready. I didn’t know what “going out” or “hunk of a babe” meant. The only hunks I knew were hunks of dirt we lobbed around the garden, pretending they were grenades. It was the first time a girl had ever liked me, but I don’t think I ever talked to her, and after she left I couldn’t remember what she looked like. So I pictured me and a made-up version of her going for quiet walks together around our farm, strolling in the summer sun, jumping on the trampoline, and laughing like we were part of a Disney movie. She lived three hours away, and I never saw her or heard from her again, but that didn’t stop me from calling her my girlfriend for more than a year.
My cousin Dan and his family moved to our farm when I was in grade five, and we went to school together for the year that they stayed. He started writing love notes to Marion, and because Dan was pretty much my best friend, I decided that I really liked her too. But his handwriting was neat and mine was small and scribbly and hard to read. She chose Dan, and I tried not to be jealous.
By junior high the hormones hit like a flood, and I started falling in love every day. I had crushes on every single one of my sister’s friends, sometimes all at once. They were a year older and therefore more mysterious and beautiful than the girls in my grade, but not one of them showed me any attention. I aimed higher. I had crushes on the girls all the way up to grade twelve. No luck. I was tall for my age, but I was pimply, gangly, and awkward, my cracking voice stuck ambiguously between boy and man, and despite my best preventative efforts I always had a foot odor problem. On top of that, I was only twelve.
But then I met Lana at the week-long co-ed summer camp my church sponsored. She was tall, thin, and had puppy dog eyes hidden behind a curtain of hairspray-crusted bangs. She was shy and very quiet, and I was nervous around her, but during meals and at chapel I always tried to sit close enough that I could smell her perfume. When our paths crossed I tried to catch her eye by making a strange face or doing a ridiculous dance. I thought if I could make her laugh she would like me. At the end of the week, I got her address. We wrote letters for nearly a year, one or two a week, and we saw each other when our youth groups got together for special events. When she turned fifteen, I asked her out in a letter, and she wrote me back and said yes, so I bought her a ticket to see Michael W. Smith in concert. My mom drove us to the city and Lana and I sat in the back seat holding hands. I got my very first kiss on the drive home, but two weeks later she dumped me and never told me why.
In high school I went to weekend youth retreats and fell in love every time. At one of them, the guest speaker talked about eternal relationships and earthly relationships, describing how important it was for us to make sure that above all else, we ought to have a right relationship with God. “He wants your whole life, not just the Sundays,” he said. He told us about his life when he was our age, how he had dated tons of girls, but he had never found the satisfaction he was looking for. “I thought I was looking for love,” he said, “but what I was really looking for was Jesus. You’ve got to get things right with God before you go falling in love with someone, or you’ll end up no further ahead than when you started. You’ve got to be satisfied with your relationship with God, just you and him, just the two of you, before you’re ready to be dating someone. If you aren’t satisfied on your own, you’re not ready to date.”
It made me feel guilty about how much I liked girls, but it fit with my understanding of what God wanted and what I owed him. I couldn’t expect to find any sort of satisfying love in someone else because God was the only one who could give me what I needed most. Just me and Jesus, that would be enough, and until I could figure out how to be satisfied on my own, trying to find a girlfriend would be a distraction. By the time I got to college, I still felt the burning hunger for soul-filling love, but I never forgot that I was not yet whole, that I was not in a relationship with God where he satisfied my every longing. I thought that if I did fall in love with someone, God would take her away from me so I would learn to depend completely on him first. The message lingered: get everything right between God and yourself, and only then will you be spiritually ready for the kind of romantic relationship God wants you to have.
The encouragement to be content on one’s own is probably a necessary antidote to the kind of illusions that fill romantic comedies, where love really does make everything turn out nicely, so sweet, perfect and whole. But the fact is, we will never be whole. We are all restless, hungry, broken, unfinished, incomplete souls. Sometimes that sense of being unfinished can keep us moving ahead, keep us alive, drive us to pursue whatever it is that we feel we might be missing; sometimes the needs and longings are deep and crippling, like bleeding, open wounds. But however severe our brokenness, we’re all trying to get healed. Healing—becoming more fully human—is always incomplete. If we hold out for perfection, not only will we be perpetually discontent by always being less than whole, but we will also never come to terms with our own fallibility, shortcomings and brokenness. Life itself is an unfinished business, and being human comes with a lifelong search for wholeness. There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no prayer or incantation to make everything alright.
The idea that we should be completely right with God before we’re ready for a relationship perpetuates the same myth of the perfect self that romantic comedies do. The romantic comedy says that we become perfectly whole and satisfied when we fall in love with just the right person; the me-and-Jesus version says, “I’ll bring my completed, perfect self to your completed, perfect self and together we can have the happiest marriage anyone has ever had, God bless us both.” In both cases, the perfect, self-sufficient, self-reliant man or woman is still the ultimate goal.
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