I really don’t like romantic comedies. When watching them it kinds of feels okay but afterwards I am left feeling pretty empty and with a niggling feeling that I am not good enough (ie not as attractive as the actors that always adorn these movies) and that my relationship isn’t good enough (ie “and they lived happily ever after”). I feel they give an unrealistic view of what we should be and what our relationships should be. While I will not blame them totally, I certainly believe they contribute to the fact that people find it so hard to stay in long term relationships these days.

However there may be one or two romantic comedies I do like. One of these is “love actually”. Martin and I watched it on Saturday night and I really loved it. It wasn’t the first time I had seen it but I enjoyed it so much. I think it manages to give a very broad view of love. From the typical romantic comedy type to the more messy unrequited love (that doesn’t become requited) and the love between long term married couples and their families and the love between friends and my favourite (can’t think why) the love between people from different cultures and language backgrounds. Not to mention who can go past that scene of the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport where people from all ages, sizes and ethnic groups greet their loved one with signs of affection and love.

I got to thinking about all this again this morning when reading my Bible and praying. I am currently reading Hosea (a very messy love story). It has been very relevant to me as I have been moved lately to really pray for some of my friends who are in difficult relationships or making decisions about relationships or struggling to forgive those around them who have hurt them deeply. This is the introduction to Hosea that Eugene Peterson gives in the Message.

We live in a world awash with love stories. Most of them are lies. They are not love stories at all – they are lust stories, sex-fantasy stories, domination stories. From the cradle we are fed on lies about love.
This would be bad enough if it only messed up human relationships – man and woman, parent and child, friend and friend – but it also messes up God-relationships. The huge, mountainous reality of all existence is that God is love. That God loves the world. Each single detail of the real world that we face and deal with day after day is permeated by this love.
But when our minds and imaginations are crippled with lies about love we have a hard time understanding the fundamental ingredient of daily living, “love,” either as a noun or a verb. And if the basic orienting phrase “God is love” is either plastered over with cultural graffiti that obscure and deface the truth of the way the world is, we are not going to get very far in living well. We require true stories of love if we are to live truly.
Hosea is the prophet of love, but not love as we imagine or fantasize it. He was a parable of God’s love for his people lived out and revealed as God enacted it – a lived parable. It is an astonishing story: a prophet commanded to marry a common whore and to have children with her. It is an even more astonishing message: God loves us in just this way – goes after us at our worst, keeps after us until he gets us, and makes lovers of men and women who know nothing of real love. Once we absorb this story and the words that flow from it, we will know God far more accurately. And we will be well on our way to being cured of all the sentimentalized and neurotic distortions of love that incapacitate us form dealing with the God who loves us and loving the neighbours who don’t love us.