| Believing the Hollywood Lie |
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Like it or not, we live in a world where love, sex and relationships get top billing in the hearts and minds of nearly all of us. Advertisers figured out long ago that our preoccupation with emotional connectedness and sex provides a great way to sell merchandise. Whether it’s using sex to sell beer and cars during the half-time break in our favourite sport or showing scenes from loving relationships while they are trying to convince us to change long-distance carriers, the underlying message remains constant – the key to happiness and fulfilment in life is all about love, sex and lasting relationships.
How is your love life? Let me ask you some questions. - How is your love life? - Where are you frustrated? - What are you looking for but can’t find? - What’s going well and what has you desperately confused? Take a moment and think about these questions. Let down those defences that you’ve used to block the pain of your past or the frustrations of your present. Conduct a brief inventory of your relational world. Sometimes our most difficult struggle in a sensitive area like this comes when we try to really understand where we are in relation to others. Perhaps I can offer some help in your personal reflection.
A way of thinking about relationships has developed in our culture that, when examined, turns out to be incapable of producing the kind of relationships we’re seeking.
Where do we get our ideas about love? I can certainly imagine a world in which children grow up surrounded by good examples of loving relationships. I can see mothers and fathers openly sharing affection, keeping love alive, and talking with their kids about every aspect of relationships. But did anything like that ever happen to you? Did your mom or dad ever sit down with you and say, “This is how to build a healthy relationship with the opposite sex’? Did wise and trusted adults ever tell you. “This is what sex is really all about’ beyond the physical details you got in a rushed explanation from a busy parent.
The answer for most of us is no. Most of us learned of love, sex and relationships through our culture. Our teachers, sadly, have been older teens who themselves came from dysfunctional homes. If that isn’t enough, the media has sold us a false bill of goods with regard to the entire notion of love, sex and relationships. After listening to thousands of songs and getting a daily dose of television, movies and romance novels, our hearts and minds have been filled with false ideas about what love, sex and relationships are all about. Taken together, all these songs, TV programmes, movies and books have instilled in us a definite prescription about how love, sex and relationships are supposed to work. You and I have spent countless hours singing along with popular songs, following television programmes and anticipating the next sequel of our favourite movie hero. In the process we have become unconsciously convinced that if we follow a simple four-step approach to relationships, it will work out for us just like it works in the movies or like it says in the song
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that all the writers of songs, movies and books got together to come up with a specific four-step approach. But I do mean that if you analyze the songs, movies and books that fill our lives, you will see emerging from them a clear-cut and consistent set of assumptions about relationships. However, once we carefully examine this formula, we may decide it could be better described as “Hollywood’s formula for sex, love and losing relationships.” If you think I’m overstating the case, keep your own views of love and sex in mind as I give you an overview of Hollywood’s formula. Ask yourself if this formula doesn’t in fact promise that you can e deeply loved, have awesome sex and walk into the sunset with another person for life if you simply do what happens in the movies.
The Hollywood formula.
Step 1: Find the right person. That’s right. The key to love is finding that special person who was made just for you. She’s out there, you just have to find her. Drive around. Hang out. Be on the lookout. The moment will come. Do you remember the scene from the movie While You Were Sleeping when Sandra Bullock finds her “right one” when he steps up o her subway counter and asks for a train ticket? Then he gets knocked senseless and while she’s visiting him in the hospital she just happens to meet his brother who turns out to be her “real right one.” Do you get the picture? Whether it’s the movies and stars of today or the Clark Gables of the past, the message is always the same. Finding the right person just happens! It’s wild accidental and you’re helpless in the process. Eventually you’re going to meet the “right one.”
Step 2: Fall in love. When you find that right person, something will snap and you’ll just know. No one knows how, but you’ll just know. A brief look or gesture may be enough. You may not know her name, or much about her, but you will know that you have fallen in love. In Sleepless in Seattle Tom Hanks just needs his little boy to get on the radio and tell the nation the sad story of his father’s life, and Meg Ryan soon knows she loves this man. When they finally meet, all it takes is one look and two strangers instantly fall in love. Is it the music? That ‘old magic called love’? Or just the script? In the movies you can fall in love with strangers and it’s the real thing. In the Hollywood formula love is based on chemistry, not knowledge or character. And love is all that matters. The only choice seems to be to take the next step.
Step 3: Fix your hopes and dreams on this person for your future fulfilment. In the movies love vetoes every other decision. Brides and grooms are regularly left at the altar, because their future mates have decided to run off with someone else with whom they are “really in love.” Once you fall in love, in the Hollywood version, every other promise you have made is null and void. You can’t be held to any previous commitment. The person with whom you “fall in love” will become the object of your life, your future, your dreams and your satisfaction. You have suddenly realized that he and he alone will make you complete. He will make you whole. Life will have meaning like it never has before (except for all the other times you’ve been in love). This period of intense infatuation and supercharged emotions can last anywhere from six weeks to eighteen months. And when the feelings start to subside (and they always do), we’ve been brainwashed to conclude that our love is dying. The perfect partner turns out to have a flaw or two. Relational conflict begins to raise its ugly head. Dissatisfaction gradually erodes those once euphoric feelings. Disillusioned and discouraged, we begin to change our focus. As emotions wane and irritations arise, we start to blame our problems on the other person’s inability to measure up. Clichés abound to describe how we’ve “drifted apart” or are “falling out of love” or how good it once was, but it’s “just not the same anymore. We either chose the wrong person or we were right for each other for a season but that season has now passed. Our lack of love has nothing to do with us; it’s simply the result of discovering that we no longer have the right person in our life. And since this happens all too often, the Hollywood formula has a fourth step that has become the norm.
Step 4: If failure occurs, repeat steps 1, 2 and 3. Step 3 usually leads to failure, eventually. When relational break-down occurs, the Hollywood formula offers a quick and supposedly painless solution. Step 4; go back to the beginning. This time maybe it will work. Just go on to the next partner, repeating steps 1 – 3. You see, here is the premise behind the Hollywood formula: The key to love is finding the right person.
If your current relationship isn’t working, if for some reason this person doesn’t fulfil all your dreams and desires, if you are not exhilarated, then you must have the wrong person. He may have seemed to be the right one at the start, but the fact that the feelings have faded means that he wasn’t actually the right person for you. Throw that one away and find a new one. When you do, repeat the same formula until you get it right.
Do you know how God feels when a marriage disintegrates? Do you know how God feels as kids are torn apart when moms and dads split? Do you know how God feels when He sees the pain, rejection and loneliness people experience following broken relationships? God weeps with compassion.
But God doesn’t simply stand idly by; He wants to help. He wants people to know that He has a better way and a better plan for them and their relationships. Far from the cookie-cutter formula of Hollywood that promises love and delivers pain, God has a prescription for love, sex and lasting relationships. God created a plan especially designed for us to enjoy the highest and best with the opposite sex. Hollywood’s formula is a poor Plan B. God has created a Plan A that really works.
So where are you in your love life? How much of Hollywood’s formula have you unconsciously bought into in your pursuit of love? Are you satisfied with the results of Hollywood’s formula, or are you ready for Plan A?
This is an excerpt from the course Love, Sex and Lasting Relationships, taught by Chip Ingram. This course is available on drive-time CD or DVD, accompanied by a workbook. Place orders here
Chip Ingram is the president and teaching pastor for Living on the Edge Ministries. Find out more about Chip and his teachings at www.loterario.org |