What’s Wrong with Happily Ever After?
What is the greatest love story you can think of? For me, the first thing that comes to mind is the love you see in movies. I am a sucker for a good romantic comedy. If I see a trailer for a movie with Sandra Bullock or Ryan Gosling, count me in. A good romantic comedy has a way of making love feel magical and perfect. It may come as a surprise but loving someone in the real world is never as easy as it looks on TV. Also, it doesn’t just apply for romantic love, loving someone in any relationship can be difficult.
What the movies get wrong is that there is no “happily ever after” in the real world; at least not until we get to heaven. Loving someone requires consistent sacrifice for the other person. It is willing the ultimate good of the other, no matter what effect it has on yourself. It is the soldier giving his life for his country, the impoverished mother who gives all her food to her children instead of taking some for herself, it is Jesus suffering and dying on the cross for our salvation. Sacrifice is the epitome of true love.
We live in a world that praises pleasure. Pleasure can be good, but a focus solely on seeking pleasure teaches that anytime a situation gets hard or that we have to sacrifice a bit of ourselves, we should remove ourselves from the situation. The truth is that humans are not perfect, and therefore this philosophy will never work. When we are in a situation that demands sacrifice, we should view it as an opportunity to love another person better, and since we are beings built for community, hopefully another will do the same for us.
I don’t know who shows better sacrificial love than my parents do for me. After moving away, I have come to realize how much good parents sacrifice for their children. A few months ago I was driving back home to Tulsa, Oklahoma and the forecast showed rain the entire trip. Now, I am absolutely terrified of driving in the rain, so my parents drove four hours just to pick me up and then drive four hours back home with me. They dropped everything and spent a whole day in the car just because I asked them to. This is just a small drop when you think about the ocean of opportunities to sacrifice for another, but it shows that we don’t have to donate a kidney in order to show sacrificial love. We can offer sacrifices in small ways every day.
Good Company is a ministry at the University of Kansas. We seek to bring authentic connection in a world of AirPods.