The Radical Notion that Love is Kind

When I was a Christian, we focused on two goals within relationships. The first — to ensure that nobody had sex before marriage. The second — to make sure that those marriages never ended in divorce.

I’d been told all my life that the reason our generation was filled with divorce is that we’d been sold a bill of goods by the media, fed stories that love was romance and feeling. Divorces happened solely because people believed that love was a feeling and they could end those marriages when those feelings left. All marital problems were fixable, if people understood that love wasn’t an emotion, and that marriages didn’t exist to make you feel good.

Because that is, in the end, how it was framed. How do you ensure that no one ever sees divorce as good? You make sure that there are no parameters in which a marriage can be viewed as wrong, unhealthy, or beyond fixing. To do that means that you cannot view love as anything other than the action of being married — regardless of the state of that marriage.

So love was not feeling, but a choice; so much a choice it was possible to love someone irrespective of your actual feelings for them. Do you hate your spouse? Pretend you love them, and eventually you will. The message was, if you push aside whatever you are feeling, stick it out day in and day out, God will honor your obedience. You weren’t even promised that it would give you a good relationship — just that by obeying God’s requirement to never divorce, your suffering will be justified out of your obedience to God.

Because the problem of divorce is feelings, that meant the messages about relational problems were that people had expectations. After all, we are sinful people, and as such we think we deserve things, we think we are supposed to have boundaries, independence, relationships we get something out of. Squash those expectations. Kill any want to get something out of a relationship, and instead focus on the action of love. Become utterly selfless, devoid of any desire, because you don’t exist as a separate person anymore. You ARE your marriage. And once the romance fades, all you’ll be left with is too petty, selfish people you have to work to love.

That, fundamentally was the message. Not just that love was hard work, but that the hard work was to love.

Love was something you earned, something you’d only get after you put in the years of work of breaking yourself down. After you give up your expectations, your desire for happiness, your sense of your individuality and personal interest. After you’ve given up on the dream of romance, on the your own goals and plans, on every last thing you could ever possibly hope for. After you give up on the idea that your spouse should be good for you in any way, that love should feel good, that happiness should be a part of a relationship. Only then, only after ten or fifteen years (at least) of a hard, grueling, crying, screaming marriage, will you be (possibly) rewarded with real love.

I knew that kind of love. In fact, that was the only kind of love I knew. I knew it, when my mother demanded I make the choice to love my father, I knew it when my family demanded my heart, my body, my obedience and identity from me. Of course that was love. Of course.

So I spent my life as a relationship prepper, of sorts. I didn’t want marriage, and I didn’t want a relationship either, but if God was going to make me have one, that I needed to be ready for the pain, for the suppression of my wants and needs, for a loss of autonomy and personhood, for the hard, cold, draining nature of marriage.

And I was praised for my maturity in dismissing the romance of love, in accepting the knowledge that relationships were hard, and awful, and if you didn’t work yourself to the bone everyday, would come undone.

At no point did anyone tell me that love should be kind.

Nobody taught me that love is someone who sees you as a full person, who strives to help you in your goals, who wants only good things for you.

Nobody taught me that love wouldn’t feel like sacrifice, that helping the person you love feels easy and right, because why would it be a chore to help those you love?

Why didn’t any bother to explain what good love looked like? Why didn’t we get sermons on the kindness of love, the goodness of love, the happiness of love?

I know why. Because if you expect good love, you might think you can leave bad love. Because if you tell people that they should strive for good relationships, bad ones might not last. Because conservative Christianity cares more about the longevity of a marriage than the health of the relationship, and if that’s the case, there’s no point in filling anyone’s heads with any other expectation than a “you made your bed now lie in it” kind of love.

I don’t know how to process being in a good relationship. I am waiting for the shift. Trying to find the cosmic punchline. I worry there’s something I’m missing, that no one can just love me, and I them, that there must be some approaching danger.

The worst work of being in a relationship is in fighting back against all the messages I was taught about the soul crushing work of relationships. Conservative Christianity created the very pain and work it warned us of.

It’s not to say that there is no work to relationships, that all relationships are or should be nothing but sunny rainbows. But it’s like exercise tips that throw out no pain, no gain, leaving people to believe that injuries are a healthy part of working out. The work of relationships is a work about finding the best way people can love each other. It’s about cultivating happiness, an idea that would seem downright scandalous to my former Christian self.

It took leaving Christianity, it took getting into my terrible, sinful, gay relationship, for me to learn what love is.

Love is reassuring each other that at no point do we own one another. Love is in the way we build each other up. Love is in the way we talk to each other — with kindness, with respect, with a desire to help one another have what we want in this relationship without bulldozing over the other person’s autonomy. Love is knowing we can’t meet every last one of each other’s needs, and knowing we wouldn’t force one another to do it anyway. Love is knowing that if this relationship doesn’t last forever, it will be because we want each other’s happiness too much to let each other be in a relationship that’s not working.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is understanding. Love is gentle and safe. I know I’m mostly paraphrasing scripture here, that’s the strangeness of Christian culture. I, a non-binary gay ex-Christian have a relationship based on Biblical definitions of love, at the defiance of my Christian upbringing.

The other day I draped myself over my girlfriend and said, “You’re so nice to me.”
She replied, “I am as nice as anyone who loves you should be. And don’t ever expect anything less.”

Unnecessary men: on conservative Christian gender roles and the fear of useless masculinity

I was taught that one of the worst things about modern feminism was it’s derision of masculinity. Gloria Steinem’s quote, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” was probably the only thing I knew about feminism from my Christian community. Feminism was damaging because it was incorrectly teaching women that they don’t need a man.

Much of the discussion of gender roles was based on a premise that when men and women are behaving according to their God-given gender roles, then they fit together perfectly. They complement each other, because they each bring something different and unqiue to the relationship, something that the other can’t do.

But these gender roles leave women out in the cold because they rely on making sure women don’t: don’t lead, don’t learn to rely solely on themselves, don’t learn to be able to live alone and independent. These things are risky, because they mean there’s a chance that women would be able to function without a man. And if she can function without a man, if she doesn’t need one, that’s dangerous.

Even the book I just recently finished, “The Unguide to Dating,” while acknowledging that yes, an independent woman doesn’t necessarily need a man goes to great lengths to reassure that yes, she still wants one. But this discussion circulates around ideas of the physical strength of men. “Just because I do many things for myself,” Camerin Courtney writes, “doesn’t mean I wouldn’t gladly step aside and let a man do some of these things for me.”

This idea that a man’s role in a woman’s life is to function as a do-er is more than likely plays a role in the conservative Christian anxiety of women doing for themselves, and therefore making men obsolete. Women have to be reigned in, either by not learning certain skills, or by not performing those that a man can do, so that he still has a role in her life.

But I feel like this fear tells us a lot about masculinity in conservative Christianity. If a woman can fend for herself, and sees no need to acquiesce to a man; if she ceases to make their be a need for masculinity in her life, then the danger lies, not in women and men forming relationships by other means, but in women not bothering with men. Conservative Christianity has to have masculinity be necessary, because if it’s not, why would any woman want it in her life?

That is, I think, what lies at the heart of complementarism and the fear of feminism. In my next post, I plan to write about the ways that conservative Christianity even acknowledges that masculinity is dangerous and intentionally not good. A good man should not enact violence on a woman, but the threat of the violence is always there, waiting. If a woman could live her life without a man’s power and strength, then she might decide she doesn’t want one. And for all the claims that “submission isn’t a dirty word,” there’s is still an anxiety that if women can find ways to lead their lives without ever needing a man, why would she want to submit to one?

As a queer person almost exclusively attracted to women and other non-binary people, I have no men in my life. Absolutely none. And my girlfriend and I have both talked about our attraction to men is first based on whether or not they are traditionally masculine. If they are, that’s a big turn off. I am the feminism that my former faith would find terrifying, because I managed to get around their rules: I found out that I didn’t need a man, and I didn’t want a man, so I have no men in my life. And traditional Christian masculinity relies on the need because it relies on the power that comes from that need.

If women capable of opening jars and lifting furniture makes men useless, if the existence of feminism means that men no longer have a necessary role in the life of women, then conservative Christianity has already admitted that masculinity is fragile, unnecessary, and unappealing, and complementarism about forcing artificially created boundaries to keep women dependent so that masculinity still has a role and power.