If we connect, we have to consume.
This concept is everywhere.
In media, the slightest hint of connection between members of the opposite sex must be sexual chemistry, and the camera immediately cuts to the two in bed together. Even when same gender characters are portrayed connecting on an emotionally intimate level, the next move is to start taking each other’s clothes off. The media seems to be priming us for the idea that even our friends, if we get close enough to them on a heart level, must be used for our own physical pleasure.
Heaven forbid our spouse speaks to a member of the opposite sex. We must develop intricate doctrines around why men and women can’t be friends, to assuage our own brittle insecurity and abysmal self worth.
We are scared to share our friends, in case we are replaced in terms of importance. We are terrified for them to fulfill their potential, in case they leave us behind. We must own them.
Daycare staff aren’t supposed to hug the children in their care. Someone, somewhere did something, and now the entire first world has taken away healthy physical affection in fear of litigation. What used to be an interaction where connection for the sake of care was normative and unquestioned has been corrupted by an obsession with what we now think of as the automatic outcome of any relationship: sexual usury.
For all of us, healthy non-sexual physical touch has been banished from proper society. We are the only primates who live this frigidly.
Where did the innocence go?
Why do we automatically conflate feelings of appreciation, understanding and admiration with a desire to consume or own the person?
We speak of “falling out of love” as being a good enough reason to abandon a 40-year legacy in the making. We speak of “falling in love” as a valid reason to do things we would never advise someone we care about to do, objectively.
What if we could love without seizing and grasping at the object of our affections? What if we learned to do that so well that we could give love and true encouragement to everyone we interacted with, while also being able to drink in the inspiration of a beautiful mind, to admire a capable body, to curiously study a vast and intricate soul? What if doing so expanded all of our hearts, emboldening us toward our own personal challenges in the process? Innocently, purely, seeing each other’s value?
There has been an oversimplification of human beings into objects, to be used for pleasure and affirmation, and it has reduced most of our interactions to self-validating conquests.
Do you remember being a child or a teenager, just spending lazy afternoons with your friends talking about everything, truly communing in the intimacy of unfiltered thoughts and unrushed forays into ideas, questions, thoughts, dreams, and struggles? Nobody vying for status or begging for assurances.
What happened?
Why, the second we catch a glimpse of what it feels like to be understood, to understand another person, to feel connected, do we need to rush in and lock them down for ourselves?
Why are we black holes of absolute desperation? When we feel seen, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We lose our mind and obey the unthinking impulses of our biology.
There is an epidemic of soul-crushing loneliness. Most of us don’t even know we are walking around longing for love, until we experience some kind of rock bottom, or feel a moment of real connection and it sparks something back to life deep within us.
What do we do with that spark?
We aren’t supposed to suppress love and connection; the entire Bible is about love, connection and freedom. The how is an entirely different story - we live in a secular culture that sexualizes everything, and a church culture that’s afraid of everything.
We’ve been so impoverished in the areas of communion and intimacy, we have no idea what else to do, so we reduce everything to sex. Our society has become one of constant distraction, frenetic busy-ness, hiding behind screens and duties.
What if we allowed ourselves to fall a little bit in love with everyone who inspires us and teaches us, everyone who embodies excellence in their craft, everyone we share a smile with?
What if we allowed ourselves to feel that glow within our hearts when someone does us the honour of sharing their inner world? What if we didn’t fall back into a hollow void of emptiness after a beautiful, connected adventure with someone we love?
What if instead, we allowed it to be good, and we paid it forward? What if we took our eyes off of the fear of lack, and mined our lives for the richness of connection and experience, struggle and growth and beauty?
What if we looked around us with awe, breathing in the incomprehensible magic of each human soul we are blessed to share wavelengths with? We can’t alter the passage of time, and we can’t guarantee what unfolds next, so what could it feel like to live in the acceptance of those timeless facts?
What if our hands were open and we didn’t scratch claw marks into everything that represented our soul’s longings? What if the peace that we are enough doesn’t come from trying to snatch and grab?
What if it’s okay to be in love? And what if love isn’t finite?