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If you had surveyed my college roommates, you’d find we had a lot in common:
Still, we all wanted to find love. But when romance entered the conversation, logic went out the window. Each of us responded differently: the hopeless romantic, the perpetual friend-zoner, the totally oblivious, the player, and me—the confused.
We were normal guys, with solid faiths and decent futures, yet when it came to love, we were lost. Sound familiar?
Maybe you’ve found yourself lying awake at night wondering, “Will I ever find love?” —and you’re not alone. What you’ll find as you keep reading is that many of us are looking for a good and right thing but are looking in all the wrong places.
Love is a powerful and polarizing force. It doesn’t matter what articles you read, research you review, or statistics you study – and I’ve looked at a lot– one thing is undeniably true: most of us have an intrinsic longing for relationships.
Here are some quick glimpses at what we’re seeing in this generation:
What am I getting at? Most people want to be in a serious relationship, yet somehow, we are the most romantically disconnected group in history. You don’t have to take my word for it:
Which begs the question:If we have a clear desire for romantic connection, why are we seeing a clear delay in romantic commitment?
The main issue is that while we want to find love, we don’t know where to look. It’s not all our fault — with the advent of technology and globalization of society, the dating dynamic is more complicated than ever, and our generation has felt it most intensely. Some of the main obstacles we encounter while looking for love include:
This isn’t an exhaustive list, and there are plenty of reasons you may not have yet found a love that has you feeling like you should figure out your ring size.
If you’re in a season of discontentment where it feels like you might not ever get that love 1 Corinthians 13 talks about, I want to assure you it’s not wrong to desire:
In fact, God has hard-wired us to want these things; it’s a part of His perfect design. So how do we recognize and experience the love God offers to us even when we aren’t riding off into the sunset with that special someone?
“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” Genesis 2:18
Here, God not only recognizes that it’s nice for us to have someone around, He goes as far as to say that it’s not good for us to be disconnected from others. Doesn’t that make you feel seen? And while this could mean having someone to meet at the end of the aisle, this passage isn’t first and foremost talking about marriage. When He says, “It’s not good for man to be alone,” that word for “man” is rightly translated as “human” in the Hebrew. Meaning God isn’t saying it’s not good for a guy to be single, but that it’s not good for a person to be lonely.
Marriage is one way of being meaningfully connected to someone, but it certainly isn’t the only way of being meaningfully connected to someone. You don’t have to lower your standards to feel accepted, rush to the altar with the wrong person, move in with your girlfriend to start adulting, or indulge a situationship to get your emotional needs met—because in Jesus, you are not alone.
Jesus is gathering people together from all over, from broken backgrounds, different skin colors, various languages, and an array of personalities—and He is meaningfully connecting them in Himself.
No one has to face this world, fight their sin, or forge some path alone: You can do it with us.
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28
Adam had a job to do, but he couldn’t do it alone. He needed a partner, which he didn’t find without a fair bit of effort, mind you. Adam basically swipes left through every possible partner on the planet, which may feel like your experience as you’ve searched for a partner, until God at last makes a “helper fit for him”. (Genesis 2:18)
Not only did God make man and woman in His image, but He made man and woman with His mission. He wanted them to relate in their union to His love, and He wanted them to cultivate the world with His love.
Adam’s potential depended on the presence of Eve. He didn’t depend on her to fulfill him —she didn’t fill some vacancy in his heart, make him into a whole human, satisfy his every longing —nor should you expect to do that for a man. You can’t help fulfill someone’s being, but you can help fulfill someone’s calling.
That’s what Eve did for Adam, and that’s what we do for one another — not just as husband and wife, but as brothers and sisters. We’re called to engage the world with the love of God.
What does this have to do with dating? You don’t have to pair off with a person to feel fulfilled, because God has already united you into a fulfilling purpose. That’s His story: When our world was absent of love, Christ came to give it not just so we could keep it to ourselves, but so we could share in the work He started.
Now I know some of you hear everything I’m saying and, while you may not disagree, you’re still somewhat discontent. “Sure, I can be meaningfully connected to other people, it doesn’t have to be a dating relationship. I’m down with all of that…but Kylen, I really want someone to know me, be near to me, love me, accept me. I want intimacy, and I want it romantically.”
If that’s you, listen: God’s not against that, because that’s what we see at the very end of Genesis 2. After God walks Eve down the aisle and gives her to Adam in that very first wedding in human history, we read that:
“Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:24-25
That’s about as intimate as it gets. They were naked and unashamed, meaning they were totally exposed to one another yet totally embraced by one another with nothing to regret. Doesn’t that sound amazing?
Well, it lasts all about one page, because as you turn into chapter 3, we see that what was once a relationship of safety and security quickly devolves into a relationship of accusation and shame. Why? Because of sin.
You see, even the perfect marriage with perfect connection to each other and a perfect purpose to fulfill and perfect intimacy with one another ultimately failed because they forgot the right love and found the wrong one. They forgot the love of God and found the love of self…and because they did, everything broke. Their connection was shattered. Their fulfillment was stolen. Their intimacy was lost. And if it happened to them, it will happen to you —for some of you it already has.
I can teach you how to date, who to date, when to break up, how to move on—but all of that is useless if we don’t build on the right foundation. What good is a guy’s or a girl’s love if they don’t know God’s love?
You see, we find love where we forgot love.
Although we have all forgotten God at one time or another, God never forgot about us. In summary, we know:
We can find love because His love finds us.