So this is the last night of our relationship series…tonight we move from friendship and family to talk about romantic relationships. And I may strike you as an odd choice for tonight’s topic…but you see…I might not have Christian’s warm family background or Dan’s modeling career (come on, Dan is so good looking that one person who looked like that wasn’t enough)…but I have something to offer that neither of them do…You see, I’m an engineer…
Now, I understand if maybe you don’t immediately connect engineers and romance in your mind.
Yep, that would be understandable…
But here’s the thing… there is a reason societies keep Engineers around despite our famed inability to have a conversation that is not awkward…Engineers figure out how things fail…and the really remarkable thing is that engineers usually figure how things fail BEFORE they fail. And that is why normal, well adjusted people like you keep us around.[1] We are odd, but useful (pic).
Some failures are pretty obvious and mildly comical.
Others are difficult to predict and have more devastating consequences.
But catastrophic failures like this are relatively rare…because of engineers.
Engineers predict how things fail…before they fail. It’s called ‘Failure Mode Analysis.’
And when it comes to bridges and buildings, we can be happy to outsource failure mode analysis that to a community of superheroes with thick glasses, stained ties, and low social intelligence. But it seems like we could all use a little ‘failure mode analysis’ when it comes to our romantic decisions…because the world of Christian dating and romance is strewn with wreckage. People may not agree on the solution, but most people agree that the failure rate[2] is unacceptable. We do this thing poorly. [3][4] In particular, we spend too much time and energy as a community working through relational wreckage…that someone should have seen coming.
You see, we all eventually learn how relationships fail. [5] But there are two ways to learn this. You can learn it experientially, you can have a careless romantic relationship or four that you end up regretting…or you can learn how things fail before they fail. And you see figuring out the how relationships fail before they fail and then avoiding those regrets is what the Bible calls ‘wisdom’.
Now a dating talk on dating is a little hard to do…because the Bible doesn’t really talk about it. Dating as we think about it didn’t exist when the Bible was written. It’s a novel cultural artifact.
Beth Bailey wrote a scholarly book on the history of dating in the United States…a scholarly book with a fun title. From the Front Porch to the Back Seat: Courtship in 20th Century America – dating and even courtship are historically novel cultural artifacts. We have only been dating as a culture since automobile ownership became prevalent. It’s only been a couple of generations…so in a sense it is a grand social experiment, that, incidentally is not going particularly well. And so it is not surprising that the Bible does not have a lot to say on an obscure cultural practice limited to part of the world for a small fragment of history.[6][7][8]
But what’s another novel cultural artifact that Bible doesn’t talk about? Here’s one…pants. (CLer reading the bible thinking about pants) The Bible is almost entirely silent about pants…but I still need to decide if I’m going to put some on before I leave my house….and in that decision, I am guided by what the Bible calls wisdom. You see, on topics that the Bible does not explicitly speak on, where we have to apply Biblical thinking to novel cultural situations, the Scriptures do not leave us adrift. They tell us again and again and again to seek wisdom. [9]
Proverbs 4
5 Get wisdom; get insight;
do not forget...
6 Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
7 The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever you get, get insight.
8 Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.[10]
To kind of bring back the engineering language…modern relationships are prone to failure.[11] But many of us aren’t doing the kind of rigorous assessment of them that comports with the importance of the decision. Many of us are putting more rigorous analysis into that life altering decision between a droid and an iphone.[12] We have bought the cultural falsehood that romance is something that happens to you…that love is something you ‘fall into’…like mordor or that creepy pit creature in Return of the Jedi.[13]
You hear people say all the time ‘you can’t choose who you love.’ Now, there is a mysterious aspect to attraction…BUT…people hide behind that idea to absolve them of the huge responsibility is attached to their romantic choices.
And so I have used the engineering metaphor of ‘failure mode analysis’ to organize this talk. Engineers talk about 'failure' modes, because there are multiple ways that a structure can fail and each possible 'failure mode' requires careful planning, analysis and reflection before you can have confidence in the integrity of the design. And so I am going to assert that contemporary Christian romantic relationships have at least 4 failure modes. You need to assess each of these and make a plan:
Failure Mode 1: Motivation
The first thing you have to get right is the motivation for romance. You absolutely must have a theology of romance and sexuality before you do romance and sexuality. If you don’t understand these aspects of your humanness theologically, you are not likely to experience them the way they were indented. And so let me pose the question: What is Romance For? What Function Does it Perform? What is the Purpose of Romance?
In other words, What is a sound motivation for pursuing or entering into a romantic relationship? If you haven’t given substantial reflection to this question you may need to put the brakes on getting into one. [14]
If you get this wrong, the whole thing is distorted. And it can end up distorted in equal and opposite ways.
Some are too eager for romance and marriage and some of you are too scared of it.
The reason it is hard to write a talk like this is that some of you want marriage too much and others want marriage too little – some of you have a marriage idol and some of you have an independence idol [15] But you see, the person who is too eager for romance and marriage and the person who is too scared of it have something in common. They are both thinking about how romance and marriage will affect their happiness.
I occasionally get questions like ‘how high should my standards be…are my standards too high or too low’ – well, it depends what kind of heart sickness you tend towards. Do you look to marriage to fulfill your longings or do you fear marriage as an obstacle to your longing?
They aren’t actually two separate idolatries…they are two symptoms of the same idolatry. Marriage is perceived as either a means or an obstacle to happiness. It is neither.
Both motivations are consumptive. They ask the question: “How will I benefit from getting into or not getting into a relationship?” How will it augment or detract from my happiness. They are both self involved.
“Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become "whole" and happy.” [16] Hauerwas
Marriage, like the rest of your life, is not fundamentally about your happiness or your misery…it is about Jesus and his Kingdom. [17]
So happiness is a mistaken motivation (though, like so many things in the Christian life, it can be a frequent incidental side effect of a relationship that is built on better things). Viewing romance as a vehicle or obstacle to happiness or fulfillment makes people simultaneously too terrified and too eager. But, what is an appropriate motivation. What is the purpose of romance?
The purpose of romance is to move turn a friendship into a family…it is the process by which we turn a friendship into a (missional) family. (which is the smallest functional unit of that God uses to build his missional community). Genesis tells a story of generations because God tells his story in generations.
The reason we are doing a romance talk in the context of friendship and family talks is that you can only understand romance theologically if you understand friendship and family theologically.
Thesis:
Romance is the means for turning a friendship into a family.
This is the thesis of the whole series.
Romance doesn’t exist for itself or by itself. It has the purpose of family building and is constructed from the raw materials of friendship. If you abstract romance from either friendship or family, If you don’t start with a robust, well developed friendship or have a goal that is something short of a God honoring family that is part of His multi-generational purposes, you distort it.
Because Romance is the means for making a family out of a friendship.
You see, here’s the thing. The whole dating thing, the process by which you choose who you are going to spend your life with…It is a relatively brief life stage (2-4% of your brief life) yet most of our cultural narratives are obsessed with it. Sit coms, film, novels…they all focus on this relatively brief life stage. [18][19][20][21] It needs to be a time when you build something real.
Now, if the purpose of dating is to turn a friendship into a family…then what’s the Goal of dating? Well – friendship and character assessment – It’s the process by which you answer the question ‘do you want to build a community of faith with this person?’ But HOW do you do that? The ‘how’ question leads us to our second ‘failure mode.’
Failure Mode 2: Method
The second way that this can go poorly is method. If you get the motivation right, you have a better shot at getting the method right…but it is not a given. You can understand the why, and still totally blow the how. [22] How do you get there from here?
Now there are some methods that we can dismiss pretty quickly. [23]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7YV3mBo2Bw
I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’m not going to waste a lot of it by telling you that the campus hookup culture is a terrible method. I mean if the purpose of romance is to turn a friendship into a misisonal community, to build something real that will echo for generations, you do not have to wonder very long if getting drunk, having sex with a stranger, having a vague recollection of liking it, doing it a few more times until you develop a kind of complicated sense of obligation to each other end up calling yourself a couple is a successful method for this.
But in evangelical culture the ‘method’ question has become a pretty heated topic of late. There is a bit of a raging debate that pits ‘dating’ against ‘courtship’. Then there are even a few proponents of something called ‘betrothal’ but to be fair, those people are mostly just weird. And there may be a few of you whose parents are mature and admiral Christians of non-Western decent, who have to deal with the fact that ‘arrangement’ is in the mix.[24]
Now, if you are just checking Christianity out, maybe you are a visitor with us tonight, or maybe you are new to Christian community and you hear something like ‘the dating/courtship debate’ and it sounds like something out of the 1920’s…maybe the 1920’s on ANOTEHR PLANET. It just sounds goofy. Here’s the thing. I totally agree. These debates are mostly a matter of semantics.
But here is what they are all essentially getting at.
There has GOT to be a better way to do this thing.
There has got to be a way to move a relationship from a friendship to a family that is not as wrought with spiritual peril…that is more honoring to God and the friend who you have decided is sexy (looking for a synonym-or and enabler). [25]
You cannot just take the sitcom/romcom model of this, Christianize it by subtracting pre-vow sexuality and run with it. You have to forge a counter cultural method that honors God and honor’s the friend who you are auditioning for the role of ‘lifetime companion.’[26] I can’t spell out a method for you. I don’t have enough time and I’m not sure I could if I did. You are going to have to forge it out of the raw materials of respect for your friend and obedience to God. But here are a few things that really need to be part of the package.
i. Your Method has to Include a prominent role for family and community
You see, Christians believe that wisdom requires the practice of ‘self skepticism.’ It requires a cautious distrust of our own motivations. Our hearts are not to be trusted. And if our hearts are not to be trusted in baseline states, it is even more true when they are surging with dopamine and serotonin (comic). Dopamine is not the friends of wisdom. Its purpose is to make you forget how hard it is to raise a child so you will heedlessly engage in the activity required to make one.
Wise friends and ESPECIALLY family are great ‘blind spot mirrors.’ If you let them, they can be really helpful at being skeptical for you when you are not capable of being skeptical about yourself.
You need to outsource some of the authority to assess your relationship to qualified and wise individuals, including some who have been married a long time, whose assessment apparatus has not been chemically compromised.[27][28]
ii. Major on the Friendship.
“Marriage is not basically romance garnished with friendship…it is basically friendship garnished with romance.” Keller[29]
Every married couple eventually figures out the kissing thing. But lots of them never figure out the friendship thing. Romantic exploration has to major on the friendship.
iii. Recognize that life unfolds in season
“A Time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.”
Things are enjoyed in seasons. (Don’t awaken love before its time) which leads to [30]
iv. Avoid dating that is either too casual or too obsessive
– replace these extremes with cautiously purposeful. Don’t leave a wake of flirtation and false hopes…but don’t give yourself too fully too soon.
v. Don’t disappear from Christian community and mission.
It always bothers me when a newly formed couple falls off the map – it is a sign that they are putting too much hope in the connection – and that they misunderstand the purpose of coupling. Because the whole romance thing is the fun but important first step in building a missional community. [31] If you are assessing a partner with which to build a missional community, it seems like community and mission would be a good context to do that assessing. Don’t fall off the map.
Failure Mode 3: Momentum
I have met with a lot of students over the years to talk about relationships. And I have talked with a lot of married couples about how they feel about their dating years looking in retrospect. I have heard a lot of crazy stuff. But there is one thing I’ve never heard. I have never met a couple that said “you know what I regret...going too slow in our physical relationship" [32]
You see, once you DTR you are in a race...it is a race to effectively evaluate if this is a person who you want to build a misisonal community with before physical and emotional intimacy make that evaluation impossible.
Tim Keller, who wrote an excellent new book on marriage and relationships which I highly recommend [33] put it like this:
“Don’t let things get too passionate too quickly….physical exploration can engage romantic obsession…(which ) tends to preclude a realistic assessment of who the person really is.”(Keller)
You need to pace the physical and emotional intimacy. And here is the deal…you are not going to go too slow. So take whatever pace you were planning on…and slow it down…then slow it down again…then slow it down again.
Now, I am going to give you a couple of examples…and they are going to sound absurd.
First: Don’t be in a hurry to give it a label. If the goal of romance is friendship and character assessment…then you can do that pretty effectively as friends…or as friends with a confessed shared interest.
Second: You don’t want to be kissing for more than a year before you can take your clothes off. So if marriage is a couple years off, so is kissing.
Third: The L-bomb. Telling someone ‘I love you’ is a little arbitrary, but it has a ton of cultural power. That thing should be within a couple months of clear dense carbon.
Finally:, everything is better in Christianity is better in community even – especially romance. (I feel like there is a potentially tasteless/dangerous joke here) Friendship and character assessment do not require closed doors, rooms that have beds in them or a lot of intense alone time. In fact, interacting with other people will help with the character assessment.
If public romance doesn’t appeal to you, question your motives
Let me summarize this point for you…SLOW THE FRICK DOWN!
Listen, better men and women than you have failed at this. Many Christians think that as long as they are spiritual enough they won’t be derailed by sexual sin. It is not enough to have passion. [34] Loving Jesus is not enough to avoid sexual entanglement. You have to have a plan. Set your ground rules before you get in a relationship and then call upon your friends to hold you to them.
Failure Mode 4: Materials
But there is one final important failure mode. Method, momentum, and even motivation are meaningless if you aren’t building with the right materials – you can hire the best structural engineer in the world and it won’t matter if you try to build a skyscraper out of jello. You know it would be really convenient and cost effective if we could build bridges out of dog poo [35] – but that doesn’t make it a good idea…I don’t care how much that would delight my 4 year old…or Zach Evans…or the author of my favorite bathroom blog.
And this is why the goal of romance is friendship and character assessment.
The primary building material of a romantic relationship is character.
I pitched the outline of my talk to a friend who is a pastor and his response was, your whole talk should be about that last point. Well, 2 years ago that is exactly what I did. I gave a talk called –“Three things that are more important than hotness”- I’ve burned some CD’s, available in the back and the MP3 link is in your handout…but let me tell you the ONE thing that I think is most important to the long term success of a friendship that elects to transition to a family.
The goal of romance might be friendship development and character assessment…it might be to determine if this person who has caught your attention has the stuff to stand by your side as you try build a family…if this is THE friendship you want to turn into a family. But that is actually not the most important character question in your romantic life.
The most important character question in your romantic life is YOURS.
You see, when it comes to the long term success of your relationship, "who you become is more important than who you marry."
Last year in both fall and spring retreats, we had speakers…Impressive and thoughtful Christian pastors…who both told us stories of their evangelical fairy tale marriages...that went horrifically and catastrophically wrong…both of them coming dangerously close to ending. I think this terrified a number of students. Now, it is only fair to tell you that not all marriages have those kinds of dramatic crises. Amanda and I have never teetered on the edge of divorce…not yet at least. But we’ve had hard times and I don’t know any couples who haven’t. So one of the things a number of students asked Amanda and I after the retreat talks was ‘why is marriage so hard.’ And here’s the answer. It is hard because marriage forces you to face yourself…and what you see is not pretty.
Keller – “the conflict that marriage creates is not conflict with your spouse but with yourself…you cannot run from yourself…in the past if someone revealed your flaws, you could always leave -marriage isn’t hard because it is hard to live with someone else, it’s hard because it is difficult to face your true self”
You want a head start on a successful marriage. You don’t need to learn how to be a good kisser. You need to learn how to face hard truths about yourself and change. You don’t need 10 dating tips, you need spiritual formation.
Both parties need to get really good at two things: -repentance and forgiveness – CH “a marriage is not 50/50…it is 100/100” Marriage requires self-skepticism and self giving grace.
But let me end with the good news. This can be done. I’ve known many couples who transitioned from a rich friendship to a thriving missional family without spiritual wreckage or major regrets. The thing about failure mode analysis, by giving careful consideration to how things fail, you can avoid it. You can turn a rich friendship into a productive missional family that honors God and as a side effect (rather than a goal) provides you a lot of joy. But you are going to have to get the motivation, methods, momentum and materials right. And you all are going to have to help each other do that.
________________
[1] Anecdote about Roman Bridge engineers? - AD comment: Roman bridge engineer anecdote? Say that out loud…. Probably not =)
[2] ‘failure’ is not a relationship ending. It is regretting a relationship.
[3] And, Dan and I are tired of it kicking our collective ass.
[4] Incidentally, this is part of why you never see Dan or I ‘like’ changes in relationship status to dating on Facebook. It doesn’t mean that we don’t like the match, or that we don’t think the people involved are remarkable. More often than not we do. But we know that there is a lot of peril that awaits them and potential spiritual wreckage.
[5] It’s okay if a relationship fails, and that not all relationships can or are supposed to work out, even if your methods, motivations, etc are all right.
[6] you could be led to believe, because it has been this way for a couple of decades – because your parents did it this way and their parents did it this way = that this is normal. Instead, we are the product of a grand (and failing) social experiment. We are just beginning to understand the failure modes.
[7] I mean, just look at your parents. AD “This line is either brilliant or terribly ill advised. I’m leaning towards brilliant…but you should probably ask someone wiser than me.”
[8] ZE “. I think people struggle with physical boundaries even more so BECAUSE of a failure of emotional boundaries. I think the attraction of emotional vulnerability causes clothes to come off in a directly related way”
[9]“Intelligence and education are only raw materials for good judgment…Wisdom is a reality based phenomenon. To be wise is to know reality, to discern it. A discerning person notices things, attends to things, picks up on things…the wise accommodate themselves to reality.” Plantiga
[10]16:16 How much better to get wisdom than gold!
To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.
[11]And by that I don’t just mean that relationships end. A romantic relationship that ends isn’t necessarily a failure. But one that ends with regret is.
[12] AD: “I think there’s an idea out there that relationships need to start and be “completely organic” for them to be true love or for them to work long term. The irony is that it’s the opposite. That’s probably why arranged marriages work and divorce rates are so high for “organic” marriages” -
[13]I think there’s an idea out there that relationships need to start and be “completely organic” for them to be true love or for them to work long term. The irony is that it’s the opposite. That’s probably why arranged marriages work and divorce rates are so high for “organic” marriages
[14] Or motivation as in, do I just need a significant other as an identity-reinforcer or arm candy to boost the street cred?
[15]“…the same idolatry of marriage that is distorting their single lives will eventually distort their married lives if they find a partner.” Keller
[16]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.
[17] This is easy to fake and deceive yourself of, especially if you’ve been a Christian for a while and can speak the language well
[18] John Green: “If you spend your life singularly obsessed with romantic love you will miss out on a lot of the things that are fun about being a person.”
[19] You see, romantic love is fantastic, but it is not fantastic enough to carry the emotional freight of our happiness, or to do the work that platonic friendship and community were intended to do.
[20]Dan: the goal of friendship is, “coming up with imaginative ways to resource our friends for doing the work that God has commissioned them to do.” – when he said that I thought, that’s not a bad definition of the goal of marriage
[21]Ash Quote?
[22]But here is the thing about Christian’s talk about method…how do you go from friends to family…what wisdom and practices do you employ? We talk more about what you don’t do than what you do do?
[23] Big bang theory: The ‘he must be very skilled at coitus’ clip
[24] The guy who was president of my undergraduate InterVarsity chapter after me eventually married a woman his Christian parents selected for him. At first I really objected to this. But the more I learn about marriage and the Bible, it is certainly fraught with complexity…but not moreso than ‘dating’ or ‘courting’. I don’t find it any more objectionable to how we do it any more.
[25] Forensic analysis of the cultural model many of us are uncritically accepting. Maybe use the forensic analysis of Katrina as an illustration of how this works.
[26]Eph 4:17-20 17Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. 18They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. 19They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20But that is not the way you learned Christ!
[27] I feel like there is a zombie film illustration here. No one can be trusted to assess if they are becoming a zombie…you need a friend to decide if you need your head splattered. Um…or something like that.
[28] (takes time – making out doesn’t help) My brother likes to say that it is easy to predict the benefits of marriage but difficult to predict the liabilities. Conversely, it is easy to see the disadvantages of having kids but almost imposible to predict the benefits. So, you see, the decision to have a baby requires temporary madness. So the stuff that leads up to sex is designed to make you temporarily insane…not a great environment for clear character assessment.
[29] Also, to think you are “good enough” or above falling to the hormones that making out produces, you have an insufficient view of your own depravity
[30] Unusable but Hilarious Stuff AD says: :A time for friendship and a time to f- err, being more than friends”
[31]This is one of the things I have found encouraging about B&A’s relationship.
[32]Stuff Adam Darbonne Says:”If only we had gone faster dating! Our marriage would be so much better! We could’ve had sex a whole year earlier than we did! Which in the context of our 50 year marriage is incredibly significant.”
[33] Now is definitely the right time to read a good book on marriage. A good theology of marriage is one of the best tools you can have in making the transition from friendship to family.
[34] AD: Uhh. Passion is actually the problem =)
[35] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRmko7VxEwo
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