What love is & what it isn't
Misconceptions and corrections from Paul
I became a Jane Austen fan in high school when I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time.
Once I grew accustomed to the old-school style of writing, I found that her stories were full of wit, humor, and honest depictions of human nature. I was also compelled by the genuine depiction of love that Austen illustrates through her storytelling.
I’m a hopeless romantic, but I’m also realistic, and most rom-coms part with reality too much for me to really buy the story they’re selling. Sure, it’s fun to watch Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey fall in love over the course of 10 days, but I can’t forget that they’re lying to each other the entire time; the experience often ends up being more stress than swoon for me.
I found something different in Austen’s novels though, especially in Pride & Prejudice. The characters are brave, smart, thoughtful, and imperfect. The themes of forgiveness, sacrifice, and second chances are beautifully illustrated through the tumultuous inner lives of Elizabeth and Darcy, who each make mistakes, repent of their sins, and grow as a result. Unfortunately for other romance writers, the classic has been my standard for a good love story since I was 16 or so because of the truth it holds.
Really good depictions of love are just really hard to find in pop culture. I think that’s because, when we try to define love apart from its Author, we’ll always come up short. I was thinking about some common misconceptions about what love is and what it “should” look like based on the messaging that I see most often in popular culture. Here’s what I came up with:
Misconception 1: “Love should always be easy.”
If you’ve loved anyone (or anything) long enough, certainly you know by now that this simply isn’t true. Loving someone can be easy, but it won’t always be.
Sometimes I am unloving—and sometimes, I am unlovable. Sometimes the people I love are that way too. The feelings of love may come naturally, but the day-to-day reality of love is that it requires hard, intentional work.
Misconception 2: “My experience is the important part.”
A pitfall of our hyper-individualized culture is that it gives us license to focus on how loving someone else makes us feel, rather than the impact it may have on them. This transforms love from a self-denying, sacrificial act to a selfish practice intended to edify the giver instead of the receiver.
Misconception 3: “There should be an upper limit.”
This misconception follows neatly from #2. Simply put, you will never be in danger of loving another person too much—at least not from a Christian perspective.
“But, what if they take advantage of me? What if they don’t love me back? What if they don’t deserve my forgiveness, patience, or attention?”
So, I’ve got bad news and good news: All of these things are likely to happen. C.S. Lewis puts it this way, in one of my favorite passages of all time (which appears in The Four Loves):
“I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’ …
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selflessness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
Why does it matter if we get it right?
Love is the hallmark of true Christianity. It undergirds every other command and enables obedience to the Lord in all things. That’s why Jesus tells the Pharisees that it’s not just the greatest commandment, but the second greatest as well: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’” (Matthew 22:37-40)
If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve probably seen someone say, “There’s no hate like Christian love.” Typically used to respond to Christians publicly disagreeing with social and cultural movements that are antithesis to Christianity, it’s a phrase that has caused me grief since the first time I read it, with the wound deepening a bit each time the words are repeated.
I could spend time splitting hairs over whether or not the statement is ever warranted. Yes, Christians sometimes behave poorly. But also, sometimes in pursuit of the command not to “conform to the pattern of this world” (Romans 12:2), Christians do things that nonbelievers don’t understand and attribute to malice. I don’t know that it’s really worth our time—or an appropriate exercise in the first place—to decide who’s “right” here.
Instead, let’s take the opportunity to turn the phrase on its head by defining what “Christian love” actually is. Thankfully, that difficult job has already been done for me by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Here’s the chapter in full:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
“Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
It’s a familiar passage, and I know (for me, at least) it’s easy for my eyes and mind to sort of glaze over when confronted with something I’ve heard so many times. But this one is just too good to skim past.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul is addressing an early church that’s rife with disagreements. Chapter 13, specifically, comes amidst a long discussion of the appropriate applications of spiritual gifts. Why punctuate a conversation about prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues with a diatribe about the supremacy of love?
Paul makes his point pretty clearly in the opening statements of the chapter: Without love as the animating power behind these gifts, they’re effectively useless.
And, in case that’s a little too nebulous, Paul follows those statements up with a list of statements that tell us exactly what love is—and, just as importantly, what it isn’t.
Love is:
Patient
Kind
Love does:
Rejoices with the truth
Bears all things
Believes all things
Hopes all things
Endures all things
Love is not:
Arrogant
Rude
Irritable
Resentful
Love does not:
Envy
Boast
Insist on its own way
Rejoice in wrongdoing
So, if you’re looking to love boldly and be a model of Christ in your community, here’s a really useful litmus test. Imagine what the world could look like if we took Jesus’ command to love 100% seriously, and followed that up by radically exhibiting the values Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13. I’m praying that the Lord will give me (and you) the strength to do just that.
Now, LMK:
What pop culture misconceptions about love stand out to you? What’s your response to them? Let’s talk about it!