Sermon Tone Analysis

/“How Do I Know If I’m in Love?”/

By H. Norman Wright

 

A couple is sitting in my office for their initial session of premarital counseling.

They’ve come with a mixture of expectations and apprehension, since they’ve heard the sessions will be very thorough.

About halfway through our time together, I ask the man to describe in detail the love he has for his fiancée.

After his response, I ask her a question which throws her, since she assumed her question would be the same.

The ques­tion is, “How do you know that you love him?

What convinced you?” Sometimes the responses are complete and full of substance, whereas others are lacking.

I’ve heard remarks like, “Well, I just know that I love him or her.

It can’t really be explained.”

But perhaps it does need to be examined, explained, and even expanded.

I’ve had individuals ask, “How do I know if I’m in love?

How can you be sure?

And what is love?”

All of these are important questions.

One of my favorite cartoons depicts two chickens looking at two swans with necks intertwined and eyes glazed.

In answer to the question, “What is love?” one chicken responds with, “Love is a feeling you feel when you have a feeling you’ve never felt before.”

That may be love, or it could be some bad onions you ate for lunch.

How would you describe love?

How would you define it?

What’s the difference between love and infat­uation?

Is romantic or passionate love necessary in a relationship?

And the big question, “How do you know when you’re really in love?”

 

Let’s consider a few basic facts about love:

 

1.

/Love at first sight is rare.

/An infatuated attraction may happen immediately, but true love needs time to develop.

 

2.

/Love is NOT consistent.

/Your emotional response to your spouse will vary over the months, years, and decades of a relationship.

3.

/Most individuals can fall in love many times.

/But the often involuntary physical and emotional at­traction of “falling in love” should not be confused with the willful and abiding commitment to love selflessly the person who has captured your heart.

4.

/The quality of courtship love will change and deepen in marriage.

/And each succeeding level of love can be as exciting, rewarding, and fulfilling as the last.

 

5.

/Love in a marriage relationship can diminish and even die.

/Love must be carefully nurtured and cherished over the years if it is to endure the stress of two imperfect people living together.

I also like what M. Scott Peck says in his book /The Road Less Traveled /about the illusion that erodes so many marriages today:

 

To serve effectively as it does to trap us into marriage, the experience of falling in love probably must have as one of its characteristics the illusion that the experience will last forever.. . .

The myth of romantic love tells us, in effect, that for every young man in the world there is a young woman who was “meant for him,” and vice versa.

Moreover, the myth implies that there is only one man meant for a woman and only one woman for a man and this has been predetermined “in the stars.”

When we meet the person for whom we are intended, recognition comes through the fact that we fall in love.

We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other’s needs forever and ever, and therefore live happily ever after in perfect union and harmony.

Should it come to pass, however, that we do not satisfy or meet all of each other’s needs and friction arises and we fall out of love, then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or “true” love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced.56

Love is not something that just happens; it must be cultivated so it can grow.

* *

*Romantic Love: Beliefs, Fallacies, and Benefits*

 

Perhaps these thoughts are new to you or you’re already aware of them.

You may even be bothered by them, especially if you’re a highly romantic person.

Romantic and passionate love are a necessary ingredient, but there must be more than this for a marriage to last.

Romantic love is a necessary part of the process, but it can also be the great deception in a relationship.

But it makes us feel so good.

Often the predecessor to romantic love is infatuation.

Webster’s dictionary defines this as “to make foolish, cause to lose sound judgment; to inspire with shallow love or affection.”57

It’s also been defined as foolish, all-absorbing passion, as well as /blind love.

/You see what you want to see, but it’s not really there.

Or what you see is not what you’re going to get!

And when it dies, it’s like stepping out of a plane without a parachute.

The trip down is long and painful.

Some biochemists believe that an amphetamine-like substance is released by the brain of an infatuated person and causes something similar to a drug-induced high.

But when the infatuation stops, withdrawals occur.

Psychologists suggest that most of the time infatuation involves falling for a person who fills some vacancy in your life, but your intended can’t produce what you’re after.

Objectivity is low, and rose-colored glasses are in place.

You see the other person as the answer to all of your problems and personal defects.

The other person seems to fill in the missing parts of yourself.

Life takes on a freshness and you see the other person as the best you can find.

You feel omnipotent, and your attention and concern is for the other person.

You may think this only happens to those in their teens, but I’ve seen it hit those in their twenties, thirties, and forties.

Many people don’t like to admit they are infatuated; rather, they say they have an intense romantic love for their partner.

I looked up this word in the dictionary as well and found that /romance /or /romantic /means “an emotional calling; having no basis in fact: imaginary, visionary, marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of the heroic, adven­turous, remote, mysterious, or idealized; an emphasis on subjective emotional qualities; marked by or constituting passionate love.”

When there is romantic love, you feel that no one else has ever felt what you are feeling.

Often there is an eerie sensation of “even though we’ve just met, I feel as though I’ve known you all my life.”

There seems to be an instant rapport or connection.

But many say romantic love is a myth and a dangerous one for the marriage relationship.

As M. Scott Peck describes the “Myth of Romantic Love” in the passage just quoted:

 

We have met the person for whom all the heavens intended us, and since the match is perfect, we will then be able to satisfy all of each other’s needs forever and ever.

There is an emotional high involved with romantic love.

There are elevated feelings of delight, triumph, and the belief that “I can do now what I couldn’t do before.”

Often it overrules the rest of the pain and disillusionment of our life and gives us a false promise that it will last forever.

It thrives on uncertainty and novelty.

Romantic love also acts as an anesthetic or a Novocain to the hurts in our life.

This can occur whether there is sexual involvement or not.

If sex is involved, the physical passion often creates an intensity to the romantic feelings that can only be maintained by peak sexual experiences.

On the other hand, this intense love can cause couples to override their Christian values and have full sexual expression become the end result of their romantic experience.

But romantic euphoria will fade.

That is a fact.

M. Scott Peck also says,

 

The experience of falling in love is invariably temporary.

No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough.

This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love.

But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterized the experience of falling in love always passes.

The honeymoon always ends.

The bloom of romance always fades.

Many people base their romantic love on physical attraction and soon end up making love physically.

And within this intensity of passion they decide to marry.

When this love diminishes, a new and more mature love needs to develop and replace it.

But if it doesn’t, the couple will probably divorce or have affairs.

Either option is their attempt to recapture the feelings that have been lost.

Physical attraction by itself, without the other elements of deeper love, will carry a marriage for about three to five years.

That is all.

Some of those three to five years may have been used up before the couple mar­ries.62

If a couple marries with the romantic attraction stage as their basis, they can expect the romance to carry them for perhaps five to eight years before things begin to come unraveled and the criticisms and attacks on one another intensify.

What are the problems with a relationship just based on romance?

Consider these beliefs and the actual facts about them.