• “What is love?”

    by  •  • LifeStuff • 0 Comments

    Roxburying

    Kattan and Ferrell still want to know.

    A week ago or so, I was talking to a good friend about her dating life. She had been dating a great guy for the last 5 months or so, and then the picture incident happened, and everything changed.

    Basically, after being a couple for months, after the many times they had publicly exchanged kisses and held hands and after they had melded their daily schedules pretty tightly, my friend posted a first picture of her with her beau together- tagged- on Facebook. And then, she told me, the backpedalling began. I know the guy a bit, and from everything I’ve learned about him and seen from him, he’s a quality guy. The tagging, though, rattled him. Evidently, though he was fully involved with my friend, he was still linked to his ex-wife online. And the picture post, the publicizing of the relationship that was a significant statement for her, became troubling to him. He told my friend he cared about her and wanted to be in her life, but that he needed to step back and work on some things. And she was baffled. The picture.

    We live in baffling times.

    This last week, hackers infiltrated the Ashley Madison website- a website built specifically to help unfaithful spouses find other unfaithful spouses for affairs- and then they made the member information they uncovered publicly available, effectively dousing the named in a sea of scrutiny and shame. The hackers felt entitled to humiliate. The site members felt entitled to cheat.

    While the exposure of member information by the hackers was pretty bad, perhaps the worse realization in this case is that security on the internet is not as good as we hoped, or as it should be. You can give personal data to sites here or there with great trust, but if desired, there are those out there that can also get to it if they want.

    What should be more troubling is that men and women who marry- who are making a pledge to fidelity- decide to blatantly undercut their stated commitment to a person and a relationship to seek liaisons elsewhere. And let’s not gloss it over here. The reason for cheating here is basically for sex.

    It’s not like this hasn’t happened before in human history. Men and women have had affairs as long as they have been around. Ashley Madison just tried to normalize, formalize and commercialize the behavior. A behavior that runs contrary to nurturing and strengthening a love relationship.

    Which leads me to wonder: what’s the point of being married if you want to cheat on your spouse? Certainly, their are those social and financial considerations that make men and women decide they need to preserve the arrangement while their heart is far from it. What will the Jones’ think? What would mom and dad think if we divorced? We need to stay together for the kids. I need the insurance policy we’re in.

    What about your spouse? What about him or her? Where do they fit in in your personal life maximization calculus? And that old-fashioned term, integrity- where does it fit in your living-a-life-of-value schedule?

    That great philosopher and pop artist Haddaway had great insight in 1993 when he asked that famous question (repatedly) in his song, “What is love?”

    (Baby don’t hurt me
    Don’t hurt me
    No more)

    Commitment. Integrity. Care. I think those are in there somewhere.

    Something like that.

    Passing the FB picture test, for starters, I guess.

    Alright. You know you need to revisit this now. Here you go.

    About

    A web programmer by day, I somehow still spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, God, and the significance of grace and love in daily events. I am old school in the sense that I believe in the reality of sin, and in the need of each human heart for deliverance to the Divine. I am one of those who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that you can find most answers to life's pressing issues in Him and His Word, the Bible. I ain't perfect, and a lot of the time I ain't good, but by God's grace and kindness, I am forgiven and free.

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