Is Love a Choice? Joel’s Perspective

Is Love a Choice?

I recently told someone that love is a choice.  C.S. Lewis was asked by a friend once, “Is it easy to love God?”  He responded, “It is easy to those who do it.”  This response, by one of the greatest layman apologists of all time, illustrates the personal choice of love in our relationship to God.  If we choose to love God, then the act of loving God becomes easy.  If this is true of our love for God, surely it is true of our love for others.  Yet, the Doctrine of Election has led me to reevaluate this underlying assumption. Why is it that love is sometimes easy and sometimes really, really hard?  Is this fact a reflection on the heart of an individual or could it be that love is not just a choice but also something else?  Could there be some hidden duality in love that transcends our comprehension? Asking this question made me think about our conceptions of love and how much control we really have over it.  In the end, my exploration of this concept led me full circle.

In today’s world the meaning of love has in many ways lost its value.  Its definition changes depending on the person you ask.  Couples debate the difference between loving each other and “being in love” implying that one has a higher meaning.  We use phrases like, “I loved that movie” or “I love ice cream” when really we mean that we have a fondness for a particular thing.  We confuse love with infatuation, which, similar to love, can cause blindness.  As a result, the verb and noun forms of love have increasingly been used to describe reactions rather than decisions.  I believe this is true in many dating relationships today – it describes a reaction TO a person rather than a decision FOR a person.  I believe that the purest definition of love is the act of putting the other person’s happiness ahead of your own.  To do this, the person must be prepared to sacrifice his or her own happiness, and in that sacrifice, find true happiness.  I believe that this is something one must consciously choose to do.  The decision to love is the hardest part of love.  But once the decision is made, as the Lewis quote exposes, the decision becomes easy and even effortless.  Therefore, I believe that not loving someone is also a choice and sometimes the easiest thing to do in order to preserve our individuality and sense of purpose and not sacrifice our own happiness.

What I have struggled with recently is the notion that choosing not to love someone is an inherently selfish choice.  Timothy Keller says, “A love relationship limits your personal options…Human beings are most free and alive in relationships of love.  We only become ourselves in love, and yet healthy love relationships involve mutual, unselfish service, a mutual loss of independence.”  Therefore, choosing to not love allows someone to remain independent and continue pursuing his or her own individual way.  Keller goes on to say, “It can’t be just one way.  Both sides must say to the other, ‘I will adjust to you.  I will change for you.  I’ll serve you even though it means a sacrifice for me.’  If only one party does all the sacrificing and giving, and the other does all the ordering and taking, the relationship will be exploitative and will oppress and distort the lives of both people.”

Today’s young generation is on average getting married much later in life than when their parents were married.  I believe one of the reasons for this trend is the desire of many to remain independent for a longer period before they sacrifice their independence for a marriage.  If love means losing independence (and not at the same time becoming “most free and alive” as Keller notes), then the choice to not love, or resist love, is the easier choice.  Sacrifice and less independence go against the individualism prevalent in today’s thinking.  But, as we know from our love for Christ and His love for us, through love (and through the restrictions of love), we are set free.  Unfortunately, many lose sight of the freedom that is gained in the love of a marriage.  Instead of new dreams being dreamt, new possibilities being created, and new adventures being realized, there is a view that one has to sacrifice his or her identity and self-proclaimed purpose in life in order to make a marriage successful. How is this view not inherently selfish?  Are not two greater than one?  And three greater than two?  A person’s identity and purpose in life can be made complete and more fully realized in a marriage!  Both parties can have their cake and eat it too!!  But, the common view is that marriage is more like a prison or a compromise, with too many restrictions, rather  than the human relational representation of Christ’s sacrificial and freeing love for us.

Keller later quotes C.S. Lewis, “Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”  C.S. Lewis, in this quote, touches upon an interesting concept.  Could the very act of choosing not to love make it increasingly difficult to choose love in the future?  If someone has never risked a broken heart, how can they then expect to be truly selfless to another human being in this life?  Doesn’t selflessness require risk and sacrifice?  Does risk aversion to love, with little to no experience with self-sacrifice, lead to systemic and ingrained selfishness?

This sounds like a judgment, yes.  It is not meant to be.  Rather, it is my thought process that leads me to my next point.  Perhaps love is not just a choice, as I believe, and not just an unavoidable reaction or occurrence as much of our secular culture believes.  While the view that love is purely a choice puts all the responsibility of love on the individual, the view that love is something that “just happens” removes all responsibility.  Both of these views are perhaps incomplete.  Instead, love could be at the same time a choice AND an unavoidable occurrence.  In this way, the concept of love takes on the similar characteristic as the Doctrine of Election; you can have free will and election at the same time.  Thus, those who helplessly “fall in love” and those who choose love are both correct.  Right?

But this view also leaves something to be desired.  Doesn’t this duality make it easy to justify our love experiences from the standpoint of an unavoidable occurrence?  If love is in any way an unavoidable occurrence, don’t we also have a choice in how to respond to that occurrence?  If we helplessly “fall in love” with someone, isn’t that love only realized through the personal choice to act on that love?  Choice implies accountability, consequence, and risk, and therefore can be repugnant to modern audiences.  Those who divorce often justify their decisions by pointing to the unavoidable occurrence of “falling out of love”.  This is a choice to a perceived unavoidable occurrence.  The same phenomenon can occur at the beginning of a relationship as well.  Regardless of how love is analyzed, as purely a matter of choice, as purely a matter of unavoidable occurrence, or both, the need to choose, and act on that choice, is always present.  Therefore, I am led to conclude that love is still primarily a choice over and beyond an unavoidable occurrence.  Love can be easy, as in the case with family members, or it can be hard, as in the case with a stranger or enemy.  But I believe that the ability and proficiency to choose love is realized only through the practice of exercising that choice…regardless of the relationship.  This brings us back to the other insightful aspect of Lewis’s initial quote: “It is easy to those who do it.”  Love only becomes easy for those who choose to enter in.