People Have Lost Contact With Love

Michael L. Ford, Th.D.

            Valentine’s Day is supposed to be primarily about recognizing that special someone in your life. But today there is a disconnect with what that truly means. The Bible predicted that in the last days men’s hearts would grow cold. And it has. Over half the marriages made today end in divorce. Jesus said that Moses was allowed to give the Hebrew children the ability to divorce because of the hardness of their hearts. I think men’s hearts are even harder today.

            There are a number of reasons why this is so. People blame forty years of birth control that reduced the penalties for fornication to mainly disease and emotional devastation, things that are often not visible to the naked eye, like out of wedlock pregnancies. The bigger problem was that our culture stopped condemning premarital sex and people living together without benefit of marriage. Over fifty percent of adults under forty in America today have lived or are living with someone without benefit of marriage.

As a counselor I have learned that when women trade away their standards they also give away a man’s respect, even though he might eventually marry her. Most cases where one partner is suspicious the other has been unfaithful, without evidence, you discover in looking into their history that they were not chaste with each other before they married.

Today people define love in sexual terms and while physical intimacy is an important part of marital life, love is much more than that. During the period prior to marriage people plant the seeds of the intimacy of sharing the inner self that makes for excellence in marital relationships. When they darken courtship with sinful behavior they place a barrier to the development of the genuine closeness they should be able to share throughout their lives.

Abortion has also served to cheapen relationships. How is it possible to respect those who do not respect life? Abortion has helped turn the physical act into a thing of using instead of the sharing of caring. Like evolution, it is an idea that says that we are nothing more than animals and what we produce in the process of rutting is disposable. Numbers of articles have been written about the decline of societies where marriage and family was lost. But do a people who confuse love with lust deserve to survive? For what purpose?