Love and Romance

Romance is dead - or at least, close to it - perhaps it is still lived out in the older generations, and there are a few of us true romantics still around - but I am here to be slightly facetious. For what it is worth, Romance is dead amonst the mass of the population, and here is why. Love is a very complex thing, and I do not think that we, as a generation, have understood it properly. Because I believe that true love and true romance is to be found, and only the other day did I work out what it means to love someone (because, to be bluntly honest, I was trying to think what would characterize the perfect woman for me - so I know what to look out for. You've all done it, admit it (perfect man if you are of a female gender...) - and that the deepest love that you would ever have for someone develops from them having a unique quality, or set of qualities, that you adore in them, but are rare to find. And I stress this last point because this I think is key.

I worry about a lot of my friends, because I see them fall in and out of relationships like the phases of the moon. and I do not believe that this is healthy for them because they are getting into the "relationships" for the wrong reasons - either the desire to simply be in a relationship - I know I suffer from that a bit, perhaps it is therefore a blessing that no girl has ever found me attractive enough to want to date me - or that they feel insecure, or that they are infatuated with a person without actually knowing the real person behind.

Unfortunately this is where experience of what it is like to be in a relationship is needed, to then go on to explain why it is unhealthy - but I believe it causes a lot of emotional trauma and distress, and you gain a false view of what love really is.

So back to my original definition - when you find a unique quality in someone, a quality that you completely adore. Why have we moved away from this? Is it because of the move into becoming like sheep who all follow each other, that these days I struggle to tell two people apart because society has turned people into clones? perhaps. I will leave that up to you to decide, but the reason I think my definition is important (it is not necessarily everything that is involved, relationships are complicated after all), is because it reduces the feeling of the need to cheat, to divorce and to seperate. Because the reason this quality or set of qualities has to be rare, unique, something that you would not find in somebody else (or are unlikely to find in anyone else close by), is precisiely that, that nobody else is like them - and that because you adore those things about them, once you have them and enter a relationship with that person, you will not want to live without them. This begins the partnership that is to eventually become a marriage - that two people who cannot live without each other and become devoted to one another, work as a team and as one - when, as the bible says, the two become one flesh.

This is how it is with Christians and God - when Christians have found God, we fall in love with him - not just because he loves us, but he offers something that Nothing can ever replace - with a woman, you could argue that somewhere around the world that there may be someone like her or similar to her - but God offers unending grace and unending love, but above all, there is nothing else that exists, nothing that we can do, nor can anyone else do, to remove our sins from us, other than Jesus Christ. Why does God love us? it is difficult to say - what have we to offer the almighty, that he has no source for anywhere else? Perhaps it is that we have the possibility of being saved - nothing that any angel would ever experience - and maybe that is the quality God adores in us the most - that we can have salvation through him. (Though, I am of course merely speculating, we shall never know the full truth till we are in heaven)