Still Questioning Love... On Faithfulness

I’m still heavily invested in writing. I’m excited about offering these innovative perspectives on love and relationship. As you wait for the book to be completed, I am extremely grateful for your choice to read me through this medium. Please keep the questions coming and thanks for all your support. The following is an excerpt from my current work in progress.

After publishing my recent article, Flirting or Not…. Can We Talk, I entertained several questions asking for a more in depth discovery into relationship. It’s difficult to discuss flirting without fidelity coming into radiating focus. Many of us are sorely afraid to open this door for fear that it will lead to a matrix of infidelity --- one from which we cannot return. Set your heart at ease, your current love interest is not likely to be your last and you can be thankful for this. That thing you felt when you fell in love? You had nothing to do with it and there is no sense in trying to fool yourself into believing you did. It happened and if you could stop, it is likely you would. Love cannot be controlled. It has a mind of its own and thankfully so---Love knows much better than any of us what is best for all of us.

Being that many of us in the western world have taken our cue for moral and behavior from some concept of religion, it would be a welcomed event to see our leading religious voices explore this topic with respect and deference. This may be difficult though because many of us who lead the way (religiously speaking) are oblivious to our own presuppositions and prejudices on issues of sexuality and any of its corollaries. Immorality is one such corollary flowing from the lack of depth in this conversation. Religion often blames science and entertainment for this alleged deviance but this is a misguided projection. I have been a religious voice and I work feverishly to speak more relevantly to society and to the intricately subtle concerns that affect us daily.

Sex isn't a dirty word, but because it's so misunderstood we often replicate misguided attempts at chastity and morality. Sex is powerful especially when it's done right or righteously. By righteous, I don't mean anything conventional. I'm Marquis and chancing convention is not easy for me. Sexuality is a necessary fuel in building thriving and vital relationships. But to be sexual is not necessarily a matter of copulating; it is a matter of intimating. (flirting)

One of my first messages as a burgeoning “religious” voice was a sermon I titled, “The Comic Strip Character.” Over 20 years ago I preached this. What was true then is astoundingly true now. My lead character was Dennis the Menace. I discovered as a young adult that I had been reading about Dennis’s life from my childhood. It “finally” struck me that while I had grown both physically and emotionally, Dennis had not. He was s till a little boy. Now, over 20 years later, Dennis is still the same age exhibiting the same childish machinations. Life is not a comic strip, things do change and so do we. Regardless of the illusion of Sunday comedy, everything about us is different – especially the way evolution asks us to be in relationship.

We like things quick and simple. Quick seems better because it alleviates the pain associated with waiting – we’re just impatient most of the time. Simple is desired because we think it takes less mental work. This just translates into us not really wanting to think. We like being spoon or bottle fed and that’s okay if remaining and infant or toddler is the unspoken ambition. What most of us call simple, is usually an exercise in vagueness and ambiguity. Simplicity is found in presence of detail. We simplify by breaking things down. We like to group, collude, and fuse together conversations of Love, Relationship, Sexuality, and even belief. While these subjects are connected they are not interchangeable. This is very important.

Couched in our language, we can see that Love functions in at least three distinct ways. Love finds its way to us through the function of what I will call the Love Triad – Phileo, Agape, and Eros. We see these loves operating in all of our relationships. The mistake we make is in thinking that we actually should love some people differently than others. The surface understanding says Phileo is brotherly love – the love of friends or friendship. Agape is unconditional love or benevolent love – we should love even those who don’t deserve it. Eros is erotic or romantic love – we can only have this love for someone special. Every now and again we feel romance for more than one but that is entirely inappropriate. Only one person can have your share of romance. These connotations are all grossly misrepresented and oversimplified. In truth, these loves should work interactively in ALL relationships.

The notion of "being in love", ambiguously identified as ‘eros’is in and of itself a very selfish operation. Usually we fall in love with someone we call “lover.” The term has expanded over the years but it essentially suggests that we are in love with someone who loves us rather than someone we love. It is true that your lover may see you as you see him or her, but at this point, the relationship is being defined by what is received rather than what is given. Being in love is not to be confused with Love or loving. Being in love is the tendency of an individual to be intoxicatingly consumed with the euphoric feeling he or she gets when having the experience of someone else. It totally concerns itself with attempting to require the object of affection to guarantee himself, herself, or themselves for the sake of that individual's personal satisfaction.

Love is like water; it seeks its own level. There are times we attempt to control this love triad. We have attempted the same with water --- our irrigation systems or our dams. These are our creations to make water obey our will. We buy into the illusion that we can also dam up love, but that’s a damn lie. For some reason we think we can stop its flow and we can for a while but only for a while. Eventually love like water will have to flow through or some major dam/age will occur. Sometimes our families are relational dams or it could be our friendships, our ideas, our beliefs, our past success and even our marriages. In other words, the way we have relationships is our way of trying to control love but do we really need to do this? Can we learn a better way?

Still... Working You Out

L2L,
Marquis