Against a tide of dysfunctional love

Reminiscing over the 20 years he has edited the Modern Love section of The New York Times, Daniel Jones remembers a piece by a woman named Alisha whose high school boyfriend “died by suicide.” “She finds solace in understanding that it’s not that flowers (and love) are beautiful and fleeting;” he writes, “they’re beautiful because they’re fleeting. Meaning we must cherish them in the moment, knowing they can’t last. As she puts it, upon seeing a wash of flower petals littering the ground: ‘How startlingly beautiful impermanence can be.’”

If you appeared suddenly from another cosmos and only read the Modern Love section, you would conclude that Americans are pining for want of love. Two or three times a week I pop over to see what strange new dysfunctional “situationship” is on display for the reading public. Will it be a polyamorous polycule? Ethical non-monogamy? A justification for divorcing a man you still love because of your journey to self-actualization? Every day some heartbreaking story is told. As a Christian, I am always appalled by these narratives of “modern” love. They don’t feel modern at all. They feel regressive, tragic, and, more often than not, completely clueless.

In the month of February, the tide of disordered love reaches a fever pitch. For Valentine’s Day has been transformed from a harmless time to pass out pretty cards or murmur “Happy Valentine’s Day” into the ear of your beloved, to be an anxious display of consumption, those immiserating secular festivals where social obligation meets personal ennui at scale, and usually in the aisle of some grocery store when I am innocently attempting to restock my fridge. Before Christmas was even over, every store I entered already had a Valentine’s Section, a conspicuous array of red-wrapped chocolates (now stale), and bins of expensive stuffed animals. Right after the New Year, pink, purple, and red carnations and roses appeared at the door of my local supermarket. Against my will I pause, however momentarily, to wonder if my husband loves me enough to buy me the flowers my soul longs for.

The secular calendar of feasts admits no time for fasting, no moment to catch the emotional breath before the intense pressure to meet the expectations of those one loves best. Thus, some sane Christians forbear to observe the holiday. One author, whose articles I enjoy very much, tweeted last year that he and his wife no longer celebrate it. “Been married 43 years,” he tweeted, “we stopped celebrating Valentine’s Day probably 20 years ago. If we don’t love each other the remaining 364 days of the year, what’s the flowers and a necklace going to do? Besides, not spending $150+ on roses and fancy steak dinners is my wife’s love language.” My husband longs that this would be his lived reality. I love being given flowers so much that sometimes I buy them for myself.

There is, of course, no obligation to celebrate such a holiday, especially if your spouse doesn’t like it. But I wonder if there couldn’t be some Christian resourcement of holidays like Valentine’s Day. The word “holiday,” after all, has the word “holy” embedded in it. It was a day when Christians remembered a martyr or a moment in salvation history. Whether the church calendar, depending on your tradition, be spare or crowded, most Christians celebrate Easter and make something of Christmas. I see days like the feast of Saint Valentine a bit the way I do Halloween—an annual moment when the secular world convulses in some lost, spiritual remembrance, where, unwittingly, confused idolatry dances attendance to some other spiritual decree.

For Valentine is believed to be a real person whose sacrificial love drew the attention of a lost, pagan world. Gradually he was revered as a saint, a person for whom the love of God was no fleeting impermanence. On the contrary, it carried him over the threshold of death and into eternal life.

It isn’t true that beauty is chiefly found in things that fade away, like flowers. As Christians down the ages have observed, it is the unshakable relationship between Christ and the Church, the self-sacrificial love of the Lord for his Bride that so deeply marks the Christian faith for what it is. In a world starving for true love, the eternal Trinitarian love of the Father for the Son, for the Spirit, and finally for us must surely be enchanting.

Every opportunity Christians can seize to display the rightly ordered love of God—flowers, chocolates, forgiveness, mercy, and the good news that Jesus died and rose again will not go amiss.