What is love?

With Valentine’s day, that cursed day of torture for the single soul, coming up I’ve had love on my mind a lot lately. Now none of you know why, because I long ago swore not to write about my love life on my blog, but the topic of love is a very painful thing for me to think about, at least romantic love is. As shown by last year’s V-day post (You know the one, dead stupid Cupid with an arrow in his back) this has been a rather irritating area for sometime. But because I am human, and because I worship Love (God is Love), this is an area it is impossible for me to avoid. Not completely impossible, romantic love can be extraordinarily easily avoided, though it makes life a lot more boring, but still difficult. Because there are different kinds of love, and love is everywhere, and no matter where I go in Tallinn there are always couples walking around looking lovey-dovey. But on Friday the subject of love was not brought up in connection to God, or my friends or family, or romantically. It was brought up as a question in a game.

At youth group we played a game where we got into 2 lines and then we would all get asked a question and we would have to answer it to the person across from us. One of those getting to know each other type games. And when I was standing across from Evelin the question was asked, “What is true love?” Now this is a gigantic question that I won’t be able to answer in this post, and I definitely wasn’t able to answer adequately in the minute I had. So I went with the easy and (I thought ) obvious answer, God is Love, God is true, God is perfect. Therefore the only true love is God’s love. Or God himself. But Evelin’s answer surprised me a little. She said she doesn’t believe in true love, she thinks there is no such thing. Now that is a view of true love that I have struggled with for a long time. But I have come to this conclusion, there must be true love, or else I have no hope. I have piles and piles of evidence that we humans are nothing more than hedonistic animals who live for pleasure, and do everything by impulse and instinct. And that because as a species we want to survive we invent “love” because being in love and being married gets the kids raised and keeps humans from dying out, and that is our instinct so we do it. That is a view that is, quite sadly, very widely accepted. But with that view I see no hope, and I need hope.

I’ll be honest with you, I hate Valentine’s day. And when I see happy couples kissing, hugging, holding hands, or just being happy I want to go psycho on them and shatter their blissful self-delusion. But do you know why I don’t? Because I have hope. I might hate Valentine’s day right now, and I might feel a slight flicker of anger when I see happy couples as I walk lonely in the cold, but deep inside, deeper than the hate and anger, is the hope. And more than hope, the knowledge, that someday I will know that happiness too. Today I am single, I am extremely alone in the romantic sense of the word. I have no “prospects” and I get the feeling that nobody is interested in me either. But I know that someday I will find a women who I will love, and who will love me. And all this hate and anger that I fight so hard to keep under control will simply melt away and be replaced by pure joy. And that is why I believe in true love, because without it where is my hope? If my hope is to find a women who loves me, but then meets someone better and turns whore on me then that’s no hope at all. I don’t really want to believe in true love. Life would be so much easier if we really were animals. But I know there must be true love, and I know it’s out there somewhere. And part of my plan for the next 10 years is to hunt it down.

A lot of people might say 10 years is a long time but I’ve waited this long and I think it’s worth it. If it only takes me 4 years all the better, but my hope is within 10 years to be married. Another thing that made me think about this was in my latest issue of Breakaway magazine (Breakaway rocks!) was “A letter to my future husband” which was just that. A teenage girl’s letter to her future husband. Now of course she doesn’t know yet who her future husband is. She could be writing to me for all I know. But she wrote a letter, mostly of encouragement, to her future husband. It’s something I’ve thought about doing before. But as she says in her letter, it just feels really weird. It’s weird to pray for your future wife to, but I do that. But writing is extremely weird. But maybe I will. Especially because I believe that the majority of my reader’s are female, and of course this letter in Breakaway didn’t only encourage her future husband, it encouraged me too. So maybe even if I never marry any of you, I might still encourage you. I’ll thin about it.

But anyway, now I must return to my simple life as a single Christian young man on a mission to single handedly save the world until such a time as he finds a women who will stand back to back with him in the fray. But until then, Cya!