Being in Love

I decided to take the night off and let someone else do the heavy lifting. Here are some profound thoughts on being in love from one Mr. C. S. Lewis:

“What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust.

No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness.

But, as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing.

There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.

Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).

While being in love may not last forever, choosing to love can. You may not always feel love but you can always choose to act in love. Love in the truest sense is a verb– it is an action, an act of the will, something intentional that you do.

Sorry if I ruined your romantic rom-com fantasies about the happily ever after. I truly believe that the real thing, though not as pretty and picturesque, is far far better.

This is the embodiment of true love: not that we have loved God first, but that He loved us and sent His unique Son on a special mission to become an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10, The Voice).

Real Love

I’d like to preface this by confessing my lack of expertise in this area, but here goes.

I think true love doesn’t always look like it does in the movies.

It’s not as dramatic and there’s usually no orchestra playing a grand theme in the background when it happens.

There may or may not be butterflies and it may or may not happen in an instant, though I’m inclined to believe that the best of true loves happen gradually over time as friends realize that they are in love with each other.

Sometimes, I think people miss true love because they expect it to be like it is in those rom-com movies and in those Nicholas Sparks books and in all those love songs.

I’m not saying that movie-love never ever happens outside of the movies, but more that it isn’t the norm.

Love isn’t a feeling as much as it is an act of the will. A choice. A commitment to seek the welfare of the beloved regardless of whether you feel like it or not. And the feelings will come and go. You will probably fall in and out of love many times but you can always choose to love consistently through it all. Sometimes you have to act loving and do loving things before the loving feeling comes.

As I understand it, love isn’t easy. Love takes work. It takes dying to your own needs sometimes and putting the other’s needs above yours. It takes dying to your ways of doing things and your perceptions about how those things ought to be done.

I think it’s okay to watch those Hallmark movies or listen to those love songs as long as you don’t confuse them for reality. Real love isn’t as flowery or poetic but in the end, it’s something far more grand.

Never forget that real love led a Man to a Cross to be tortured and bleed and die for you and me. Real love said that no price was too high to win your heart. To win my heart.

That, my friends, is real love.