Fellow blogger Tim Muldoon (see his post on desire below) has written an excellent article about what’s needed to help young people form the intimate bond that sustains marriage. Dating is passe. The hookup culture is the norm. Young people “stumble from one defective friendship to another without a strong sense of how to deepen and expand them in ways that are, over the long haul, life giving.”
The remedy, he says, is friendship–specifically, the understanding that “God is friendship.” This “de-centers” the individual.
Individual feelings at a given moment in the relationship are not as important as the larger story in which each partner plays a part. The story is not about me: what I’m feeling, how I’m being fulfilled, what I’m getting out of the relationship. Instead, the story is about the friendship itself, how I participate with the other in an unfolding drama where God is the key actor. The questions are different: what is God doing? How is God challenging me to grow? What is God revealing to me about myself, about the other? Such a de-centering can be liberating, in the sense that it allows me freedom to grow, instead of being limited by my own self-interest and especially my own often unruly emotions.
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