Confessions of a Hopeless Romantic: The Bachelorette and Online Dating

by Ben Howard

I don't watch the Bachelor or the Bachelorette with any regularity, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the show when I do. In my defense, I love sports and the sport of competitive dating is no different. But I also love fairy tales and the Bachelor/ette is, at its core, a fairy tale. It's a fictional story of people who fall in love in a magical land and live happily ever after. The show ends happily ever after; pay no attention to the broken engagement behind the curtain.

I've always been a hopeless romantic at heart, so I often give myself over to fairy tale daydreams of love. I don't just want love and a wife, I want a story, and a good one at that. I want one of those stories that you tell your kids for like eight years and becomes the basis for a hit sitcom on CBS. Simple enough, right?

But there's another side to me that's deeply rational and a bit cynical. This is the side that is over fairy tales and the artistic machinations of love. This is the side that talks me into signing up for dating websites.

Everybody has a dating website. JDate if you're Jewish. Christian Mingle if you're a Christian. OKCupid if you're poor and/or bored with normal humans. Personally, after a fair amount of internet dating experimentation, I've settled on eHarmony. It's like dating, but with more math and less of that messy personal interaction.

Seriously, it's fantastic. You can work through a list of potential matches to see which one's short answer writing style sets your heart aflutter. Personally, I weed out all matches that set off personal pet peeve alarms. This includes anyone who says they read Captivating or Twilight unironically as well as anyone who refers to God with capitalized pronouns (unless they were feminine pronouns, then I might be intrigued).

I've even re-worked my own profile multiple times. I've written it serious and straight-forward, manic and ridiculous, gentle and sweet, and, most recently, semi-honestly. I use the best picture I've ever taken as my profile picture, even though it's more than two years old and it only shows half my face. I just really want people to see the best version of me, which coincidentally, is only tangentially related to who I really am.

This is insane. This is ridiculous. This is real life.
Sometimes I'll joke that I really want to start a relationship six months in, or better yet, like six years in. I want to be comfortable and vulnerable with the other person now. I want to trust them now. I want them to understand my weird quirks and my occasionally bizarre anti-social behavior now. I want to be known, but I don't want to go through that messy, awkward process of letting someone get to know me.

I'm caught in this trap, really we all are, between who I am and who I'd like you to think I am. The first is comfortable for me, but I'm scared you won't like it. The second one causes me deep anxiety, but I enjoy the affirmation.

Though this seems disingenuous, I'm not certain that it is. Maybe we have to let people get to know our somewhat artificial, definitely superficial selves before they can get to know the beautiful/frightening person on the inside.

I've had friendships that were birthed out of emotional difficulty. They are wonderful and I love these friends very much, but there is a problem. It's hard to be normal friends with them, it's hard to just hang out. We can talk about life and death and pain and suffering and I know things about them and they know things about me that I wouldn't share with another soul, but a normal conversation sometimes eludes us.

I don't think we earn the really valuable, long-lasting relationships we crave unless we go through the mess and anxiety of learning about each other slowly, over time. I think we need the often frustrating path towards trust and friendship and love. We don't need a fairy tale, because they aren't real, but I don't know if we need formulas either, because they aren't true.

Love is insane. Love is ridiculous. Love is real life.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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The Meaning of the End

That's all folks.

by Ben Howard

Yesterday I was reading through a blog post where the author had collected a bunch of articles about Game of Thrones and theology. A few dealt with the issue of morality in the universe created by George R.R. Martin. They made arguments about what the story meant. 

The author of the post responded to one of these articles by saying that, "We can't yet say what the story means because we do not yet know how the story ends."

This phrase struck me in the moment and has stayed with me since. It fascinates me because while it's true, I'm not convinced that it should be.

At their very root, stories are constructs. They are snippets lifted from an ever-evolving, ever-unwinding narrative. We give them a beginning to provide context and an end to provide meaning, but the reality is that the meaning we impose is defined by where we begin and end the story.

Take for example the story of Johnny Cash told in Walk the Line. The story told in the movie ends with Johnny marrying June as the climactic moment in a story of love and redemption. The end of the story re-defines the meaning of Johnny's experiences as an unloved child, his rise to fame, his drug problem, and his unsuccessful first marriage. The story is cast in the light of its conclusion.

Happily ever after?

But in reality that's not where the story ends. It continues through the next 35 years of their marriage. What does that story mean? In fact, the real narrative arc continues on in their children and grandchildren, in their musical legacy, and in the iconography that survives death and continually ripples throughout history. The real story can be found in every aspiring country singer who idolizes Johnny Cash.

So what does a story mean if a story never ends?

To judge something by its end means that you have to choose. Either you can cut off the story and choose to say, "This is what this story means now, in this particular moment," or you can let it play out delaying ultimate judgment eternally because even in death, the ripples never cease. The consequences and effects of a life lived and a story told intermingle with the ripples of other stories and other lives and continue forward, gently fading into one.

The question of whether meaning is tied to an ending is an interesting one to consider now when the world of pop culture, especially TV, stands on the brink of so many of these "important" endings.  Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy ended last year. Mad Men is in it's next to last season. Breaking Bad is approaching it's final year. Even the prolonged (and occasionally frustrating) narrative of How I Met Your Mother is beginning it's final season in the fall.

Is the entire meaning and essence of these stories tied into their end? If Don dies, or Walter goes to prison, or if Ted meets "the mother" and she's terrible, does it ruin what came before it? What about the story that comes after it, the fictional narrative that we'll never see play out?

Worst movie, or worstest movie?

These may seem like insignificant questions once you step back and remind yourself that I'm merely talking about vehicles for entertainment, but the underlying conversation is far larger than that.

Most Christian theology defines itself in terms of its end. That's not just true for people who believe in the rapture, or an eternity spent in a heaven/hell removed from this world, but for those of us who believe in the second coming and the restoration of creation. So many of us define ourselves by the hoped for outcome at the end of the story, but what if this myopic focus blinds us to the beauty of everything else?

What if the end, and the beginning too for that matter, aren't actually real? What if they're constructs we use to delineate and divide life into consumable chunks? And if that's true, what does it mean when we use them to explain the parts in between?

What if stories don't end? What if life keeps going on? What does it mean then?

Peace,
Ben 

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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Heaven and How I Met Your Mother

by Ben Howard

Last night my friend and I ended up watching the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother on CBS. If you’re unfamiliar, How I Met Your Mother, or HIMYM, is a sitcom entering it’s eighth season. The narrative catch of the show is that the protagonist, Ted Mosby is telling his future children the story of how he met their mother. The story is set in the present, but the narrator and his kids are set in the future about 20 years.

Different reviewers and critics have termed it a love story in reverse, or a love story wrapped in a mystery. I simply find it entertaining…or infuriating. It really depends on where the story goes.

You see the problem with a show based around a mysterious identity is that it can only tease out that mysterious identity for so long until that tease just becomes annoying. HIMYM has been carrying out that tease for seven years plus one episode at this point and its been pretty annoying since about season three.

However, I almost always enjoy the show when it focuses on its five main characters and their lives. Whether it’s how they interact, or how they deal with the problems of transitioning from twenty-something dreamers to a life with families and careers, I enjoy it. On some level the show connects to the reality of the my situation as a twenty-something who is a little apprehensive about the idea of families and careers and growing up.

As a single man, the frustration over not finding “that mysterious someone” connects to me as well. However, much like the show, I find that when I become overly focused on this kind of end goal, when I believe that the idea of finding “the one” will somehow be the pinnacle of my existence, things aren’t nearly as enjoyable or fulfilling.

I don’t think this just parallels my life or the lives of others in my generation, I think it also parallels the different focuses of the church and it affects people's faith.

A lot of churches focus on the goal of heaven, or if they aren’t so polite about it, they focus on hell. I understand why you would want to focus on that. Happily ever after sounds terrific, especially on the really hard days when nothing makes sense and everything feels hopeless. I understand wanting to jump to the end of the story, but on the other hand I think it misses so much.

The best parts of HIMYM have not been the parts associated with Ted’s search for his future wife. The best parts have been the bizarre moments of life together in community in the present. The best parts have included watching Marshall and Lily get married, or watching Barney develop into a nearly passable human being, or learning about Robin’s past as a Canadian pop singer.

Some of those moments in community have been painful, some have been ridiculous, but they have all been together, in community, in the here and now. The show's very premise is that these moments are part of the story of how Ted met the mother of his children, part of how he became who he needed to be.

In the same way, these moments of community that we experience in the present are part of the story of how we come to embrace heaven and resurrection and redemption. Real life is not a waiting room, it is an essential part of the journey filled with growth and love and pain and laughter.

If we only focus on the end of the story, then the present becomes little more than a frustrating reminder of what has not yet come. However, if we focus on the present, then the future can emerge in its full beauty without the weight of our exasperation and expectation.

Do I hope for resurrection, redemption, and the coming Kingdom of God? Of course! But until it comes, I will love my friends and family and enjoy growing into the person I will be in that hoped for future.

Peace,

Ben

When he isn’t writing about the value of not focusing on the mother in HIMYM, Ben is really really hoping that they’ll just reveal the mother already. It’s been 8 years! I need more than a yellow umbrella! You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87 or email him at benjamin.howard87 [at] gmail.com.

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