Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Love is (at least somewhat) Blind

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Tuesday, February 18, 2014   Jeff Lampl 



“(Love)bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
 Love never fails”. 

1 Corinthians 13:7-9

Sounds really idealistic doesn’t it?   Like living in a fantasy world.

Everyone lies, everyone lets others down, everyone disappoints.  Right?  Isn’t it true that the one  “given”  in a relationship is that your friend, partner or spouse is a sinner who will not live up to all they promise and all you expect?

Of course there is truth in that but it’s not the whole truth.  A bigger truth is always found in the Bible.   1 Corinthians 13 tells us about something that is immaterial, transcendent, creative, real, and more solid than what we experience when we see things only with eyes bound to the natural world of what we see empirically.

Marcus Buckingham studies stuff and he’s famous for what he finds out (really, really big organizations pay him big bucks).   When he and his colleagues studied relationships for 10 years they assumed that previous research would be confirmed that unhappy couples broke up because of misunderstanding  and that happy couples stuck together because they understood each other deeply, because they had realistic expectations of each other.

What they found instead was that the couples who stayed together had very unrealistic expectations of each other!  Listen to what Buckingham and his researchers concluded;  “a spouse’s positive illusion (yes they used this word) created an upward spiral of love”.   This kind of spouse would often find no fault their partner.   So here’s the researchers’ advice;  “find the most generous explanation for the other’s behavior and then believe it.

Wow!  Can this be transformative for your relationships or what???   Maybe this is where you (not him or her) need to start!          

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