When I was seventeen, I fell in love every week. I mean it, there was always some girl I had a crush on. It was usually never the girl who had a crush on me. For me, love was a lot of work. She usually took a lot of convincing. And every new love was a new challenge, a new puzzle to solve.
And then I met this one girl, Jasmine. Jasmine was about sixteen at the time, I was a little older. And I was playing games with Jasmine. I asked her for her number and she thought about it. Then she did something we rarely do with one another: she looked me in the eye and said, “Look, if I give you my number, are you gonna use it?” I was still playing, smiling, trying to be witty. I didn’t understand what she meant. But, she was serious. She’d given her number to any number of boys and she was tired of boys being boys. She looked me in the eyes and wanted me to stop grinning at her and actually see her for who she was. More than just a toy or a conquest: she was a person.
The fact is, too many of us (especially us guys) don’t think of the opposite sex as a person: as a unique individual with their own identity, their own goals and their own dreams. We want what we want from them: men usually wanting sex, women usually wanting companionship and emotional support. In many ways, a lot of relationships start off as innately selfish: our giving is mainly an avenue to achieving a goal. And we go into these things, these relationships, time and time again without first counting the cost. Without first assessing who we are and what we actually want.
I’m usually amused by my friends falling in love, because I know, six months, a year later, they’ll be rolling their eyes and wondering what on earth they were thinking. It’s as if they were possessed by some spirit and lost their dang mind, their nose open so wide to this girl who now forces them to change their phone number and move. This is our pathology, our neediness: a need only God can fill, but we keep cramming people into the place where God should be. People make us take detours: instead of going where God wants us to go, now we’re all hooked up with Steadman or whomever, and we’re turning at forks in the road.
Relationships don’t last. You need to write this down someplace: your relationship, whatever it is, will eventually end. It may end when somebody is dead, but, more likely, it will end because he left his socks on the floor one time too many. And the destructive power of severing that bond, especially when you’ve been in the sack together, is enough to damage you permanently.
Getting involved with somebody is a lot like sticking your finger in a light socket or crossing the tracks on the subway. If you take certain precautions, crossing the subway tracks is perfectly safe, but you know that third rail is out there. Dating is like playing that kid’s game, “Operation,” where you have to insert the wrench ankle without the buzzer going off.
Far too many of us compromise who we are and what our goals and beliefs are because we’re tip-toeing around somebody we’re “in love” with; that relationship now becoming an oppressive weight. And we say nothing, the one partner obliquely unaware of how miserable the other is—which is, in itself, proof of how dysfunctional the relationship is.
Truth is, most folks see what they want to see. He knows she’s miserable, but he ignores it because he needs her to stay (or, worse, he doesn’t care). But he can’t, with any honesty, say he didn’t know she was miserable. Miserable people wear that misery on their sleeve. That happy, bubbly gal bounding around your apartment, now reduced to staring out of the window while you drink your coffee: dude, wake up. She’s packing her suitcases.
The enemy can use your own loneliness against you and saddle you with a huge weight that slows or even deters you from the great promise of Jesus Christ. Because your attention is divided now between Jesus and Stymie. Because you let him hit it and now there’s a baby and diapers and he’s down the road someplace and you’re working just to pay the day care. All of that because you put a romantic relationship where a spiritual one belonged.
The nearer you draw to God, the nearer God will draw to you. Far too many of us “Christians” do the same silly things the so-called “sinners” do. Your falling “in love” over and over and over: that’s childish and immature. God is not in that. If God is not in your relationships, they are bound to fail. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about real love, what it is, what it is not.
I’m the last guy you should take marital advice from, but I’d strongly urge everyone—dating, engaged, whatever—to try the spirit by the spirit: to evaluate the health of your relationships in a biblical context. Is this person leading you toward your goal or away from it? Is this person providing you energy and support or simply drawing it from you? Of the two of you, which one is the grown-up? Somebody’s always more grown-up than the other one. What are you getting out of the relationship?
Lastly, the thing we never discuss is how the relationship will end. We all jump into these things like little kids, never thinking about tomorrow, never even considering rules for civility. You two fell in love, you two should be grown-up enough, responsible enough, to soberly discuss what to do when—not if—the relationship is over. Precious few of us make it to the graveyard: most of us will break up or divorce long before that. If you really love him, if you really love her: love them enough to be a grown-up, to be realistic about the challenges couples face in today’s world.
I never took Jasmine’s number. I wanted to, but, see, I was 17 and she was freaking me out. I mean, I just wanted to hit it (or make my crew think I did; for teenage boys it’s the same thing). I didn’t even know who she was beyond this fine girl in this nice sweater, booty all in effect and so forth. But, looking at me there on Murdoch Avenue, she became a person. Someone I needed to be responsible to. And, maybe, the most mature thing I did at seventeen was not play with her.
Look, date, don’t date, marry, don’t marry: just keep your eye on the ball. Discover, first and foremost, who you are, Who God is, and what the relationships between the two is. Seek God’s will and God’s purpose and God’s timing for your life. Do critical analysis, look for the cracks in your own foundation and spackle them with Christian counseling, prayer and fasting. Until you do all of that, keep your drawers on. Stop being a little kid. You have no business inflicting yourself on another person or leeching off another person to fill places God should be. Only as a whole person, as a complete person, can you make a grown-up decision about sharing your life with someone. And, even then, as I discovered, there are no guarantees.
