What's Love Got to Do With It?

Fact: Relationships terrify me.
Fact: Lots of marriages end in divorce
Fact: people my age put a lot pf pressure on themselves in this area.

Interestingly enough some of these thoughts have been going through my head lately* and I've been giving a lot of thought to the topic of relationships. This could be because I'm in one, it could be because I have been studying developmental patterns in college students, or it could be just because my cohort graduated Taylor and many of us were single and ergo destined to die alone.

It seems like a tricky thing, trying to decide who to be with. Your feelings can get all confused and you can become discouraged. I've talked to many guys who've had trouble "pulling the trigger." We question things like "Will I be challenged by this relationship? Will I be encouraged? Will we both grow? Do our passions line up? Did her mother age well?" These are all great questions.

But recently I have been encouraged to stop asking them. People in arranged marriages never ask them and they seem to do just fine. In fact those types of marriages don't take feelings into consideration at all.

And it occured to me that feelings, although important, really ought NOT to be the most important factor. DesPITE what Disney may tell you the feeling of love doesn't seem to be a good predictor of relational success. How do I know this? Because 50% of marriages in America end in divorce and I would wager that most of them were pretty "in love" at the time of the wedding. In fact I doubt very few of you will ever interview a person who says "yeah I was never really that into my wife, even from the beginning."

Instead I've been encouraged to do what I can do and answer the questions I can answer with certainty. God never promised me that I would have good relationships of any nature, he never told me that being a good husband would yield a good wife. But I do always have the decision to love well, and that will be rewarded.

And so the analogy was put to me like this. "We look at a relationship like a Christmas present and ask 'will it be enough?' When instead what we should be doing is looking in the box and asking 'wow, an empty box! how much do you think I could put in here?'"

Or as my seventh grade football coach used to say "don't worry about the scoreboard, just worry about playing the game. If you do your job on every play, the scoreboard will take care of itself."

I think the problem that many people including me often face is that we think we are in such a high stakes game that the score is really important. And so we spend so much time worrying about the scoreboard that we don't have our head in the game and it passes us by. I've never heard of a coach recommending that strategy, not even Rich Rodriguez.


*Cortney and I are very very VERY not engaged.