To be honest Valentine’s day stopped bugging me a while ago. At one point I called February 14th Singles Awareness day, but now I find other holidays far more difficult to navigate and still feel human afterwards.
To me, Cupid belongs in the same category as Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy: Harmless fun until you forget that it’s make-believe.
A more troublesome trend than a day committed to expensive flowers and impossible restaurant reservations, is a culture which champions romantic love as the solution to everything. You don’t need to look further than the entertainment industry to know that most of us see romance as a reward—people literally compete for it in some reality TV contexts—and as almost a human right of happiness. Nearly every movie has at least one plot line that doesn’t resolve satisfactorily until a character finds their romantic pairing.
We think of romance as a prize, and worse, that singleness is some kind of punishment.
We may hold to Jesus’ ideals enough to tout that everyone is deserving of love, but forget that his love is not limited to romantic expression or self-actualization. God is love. His whole message while he walked among us in human form was one of love. But when a desire for partnership overtakes us, we forget that not every expression of God’s love will be in the form of human romance.
We can too easily trust more in the prospect of a perfect partner than we do in the reality of a perfect God.
This can put pressure on one human being to complete us in ways that only God can fulfill and can trick us into believing our relationship status is the whole of our identity. When we break free of assuming marriage is the ultimate expression of love, we find relief in not having to find a romantic match for everyone we meet. When we broaden the definition of fulfillment beyond coupledom, we realize God has new beginnings in mind for us all, and is too good a story-teller to let every plot resolve in human romance.
There is beauty in the idea of two imperfect people sacrificing their personal preferences to join together as one in love. But
somewhere along the way we got the love story wrong.
The wedding that is open to everyone is the one between Christ and the Church. It is Easter, not Valentine's day, that signals the greatest love story ever told: The one of God being reconciled with his people, of God incarnate sacrificing himself out of love for us, of life and light and wholeness defeating death, and darkness and disconnection. You are included in this grand romance by a God who is madly in love with you. You need not settle for anything less.
Want to know how you can embrace the truest version of love? Sign up for our mailing list by taking the “What Type of Single Are You” quiz.