The Seculosity of Romance

“Searching for a soulmate takes a long time and requires enormous emotional investment. The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the “perfect person” that didn’t simply exist in the past when “good enough” was good enough”
– Aziz Ansari

Disclaimer: I forgot to add this to my introductory post: The danger (and my chief worry for this entire project) is that writing these summaries would communicate disdain for these phenomenons I’m describing and I am somehow above it all rather than co-belligerent because I’m writing about it. Rest assured, there is nothing here I am not exploring from the inside. Additionally, I recognize my position here as a man and it is not lost on me.

Romance 101

To fill the empty void by capital-R Religion with regards to our salvation, we have turned to the big story of Romance. Sure enough, the seculosity of romance has now fused our love lives with our quest to be enough – we look to all our spiritual, physical, emotional, and moral needs and focus it into one individual.

Romance in the modern age is much like romance in middle school. In middle school, we believe with our whole hearts that if we are liked by the right people, especially the right girl or boy, we will be enough and have transcended to the next level of “being alive”. Moreover, what we’re looking for in middle school (and in life) is approval – the validation not that we’re loved so much as lovable. As David Zahl writes,

“What sounds like a double bind make a funny kind of sense: if we’re looking to another person to accept us in order to feel good about ourselves, then our attention will be focused on how well or badly we are doing every time we’re around them, and no on the other person themselves. We will be scanning their words and movements for clues about where we stand rather than listening to what they may actually be trying to communicate.”

Self-consciousness is the bane of potential and hopeful relationships and – like middle schoolers – we have forgotten that the person sitting across from us are just as human as we are.

“No Quid Pro Quo”

Often times, if not most, romance can turn into a quid pro quo (you don’t own the word, Mr. Trump). In other words, the language of love and romance is a language of scorekeeping and conditions. “I’ll do this for you because you do that for me.” “I’ll hold up my end of the bargain as long as you hold up yours,” we say. How egalitarian of us! However altruistic our intentions may be, that kind of nonassurance set us up for a life of accounting and is downright manipulative.

In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), social psychologists Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson describes our fixation on our own self-righteousness:

“The vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong, while justifying his or her preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things…From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.”

The Sexless Innkeeper

Since the show ended back in early 2014, How I Met Your Mother and its portrayal of the male and female dynamics of romance still continues to perfectly illustrate our culture’s understanding of sex even after 5 years later. In one of the shows comical episodes, the protagonist, Ted, is teased by his more competent and sexually active friend, Barney, for allowing a woman to stay the night without having sex with her. As a result, Barney wrote a poem about how Ted is an innkeeper for women who just need a place to crash and never have sex with him.

How I Met Your Mother is one of many examples that no space plays a more prominent role than the bedroom. Ultimately, we have flipped the traditional religious point of view that is preoccupied with the perils of sexual promiscuity to a secular mindset that is similarly concerned with the perils of chastity.

You. Complete. Me.

Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother is not alone when I say that romantic love has captured our devotion for good reason. As Zahl writes,

“It is the closest most of us will get to transcendence in this life and, as such, is the single best approximation of salvation available to the human creature. the exalted language we employ to extol romantic love fits. We call it enchanting, uplifting, sublime, heavenly, everything and more. [..] Nowhere do we see romance cast as salvation more overtly than in the widespread notion that there’s one special someone out there for each of us, the yin to our yang, a single person who holds the key to both our personal happiness and ultimate fulfillment. As Saint Jerry of Maquire famously opines to his estranged wife, “You. Complete. Me.” The doctrine he was drawing upon is what we might semi-affectionately term the Soulmate Myth.”

Technology has helped open up the field of possible partners and propagate the Soulmate Myth further. As a result, today’s generation is pressured to find the “perfect person”. Anything less than that is settling. As the comedian, Aziz Ansari explains,

“[The internet] doesn’t simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it.”

What Is Love?

What then, after illustrating the pitfalls of our culture’s relationship with romance, does the other side of seculosity of romance look like? Zahl makes the case that love is not what our expectations (or disappointments) might be. He states that we should shift our understanding from “I love you as long as you don’t disappoint me” to “I love you in the midst of our mutual disappointments.” As Zahl states,

“Real love is not something we decide on. Nor is it something we earn. Love is more than something we fall into; it is something we fail into. What sounds like a somewhat more tragic view of life is actually a starting point for compassion, forgiveness, and joy. After all, we stand a better chance of loving our spouse (or neighbor) when we aren’t looking to them to do or be what they cannot do or be.”

This is what the Apostle John meant when he spoke of God is love. Scripture does not eschew romance or deny it a transcendent thrill. Instead, it posits a third model for romance and marriage, not one of expediency or mutual gratification, but of self-emptying and sacrifice.

The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person.  This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage.  It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. […] The primary problem is…learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
– Stanley Hauerwas