In the End, What Is Love After All?

I read an article this week, supposedly on love, entitled "Why We Love Steamy Romances." (I opt out of being included in the 'we'.) Don't know how widespread the Parade Magazine is in Sunday papers across the land, but if you read it, you know what I'm referring to. The lead-in states that the author "explores the breathless intoxication of being tortured by desires and dreams." She makes reference to the movie Fifty Shades of Grey, but mostly discusses her adolescent days, days she apparently hasn't gotten beyond. She writes,

"Like young girls everywhere, I had no idea what love was, or what it would look like when it finally arrived. So I created my vision of love from books."

She's been reading the wrong books. She apparently still doesn't know what love is because she has love confused with desire. I agree that what she has read has had powerful influence on her. It has shaped her thinking. It has taken root in her mind and in her heart. What we feed into our minds does that to us, whatever it may be.

Her final question is the most telling.

"After all, who doesn't want an epic love story, a grand saga, an adventure of the heart? As Fifty Shades of Grey's Anastasia Steele tells us when she meets Christian: My face is aflame. Yes! My heart pounds. Yes! I can't breathe. Yes! It's intoxicating. Yes! Yes! Yes! Isn't this, in the end, love after all?"

No! No! No! That isn't love at all!! In the end that is simply self, self, self cloaked in defeated desire! Thinking romance and lust is love only leads to discontent in one's own intimate relationships. Who can possibly fulfill the desires of such a vicarious love affair of fictional romance?

Thinking such as this contributes to the disillusionment in relationships after the embers die down. Many think they have fallen out of love and leave the relationship. No, they haven't fallen out of love. They weren't in love to begin with.

On Valentines Day, I shared a list from Paul David Tripp of 23 Things That Love Is.  One of those characteristics:

LOVE IS... being unwilling to flatter, lie, manipulate, or deceive in any way in order to co-opt the other person into giving you what you want or doing something your way.

That, and the 22 other things listed, is the essence of true love. That, in the end, is love after all. I'll take that over steamy romance any day. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Painting ~ Hesperus, The Evening Star, Sacred to Lovers 1857,  Sir Joseph Noel Paton 1821-1901
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