Link Love + What Change Requires
Are we willing to change and be with those willing to change?
In addition to some thoughts on how to experience change within marriage, churches, communities, and more, there’s a whole lot of beautiful writing, beautiful images, and fun reads linked to below. Link Love is for paying subscribers only, but it’s one of the things I most consistently hear from them that they love! Join the community today if you’re not already:
I saw a meme the other day where someone shared screenshots of a texting thread they were having with a possible date they met online. They’d been chatting a few days and the woman asked the question, “Who did you vote for?” The guy resisted answering and the conversation took a nosedive almost immediately into name-calling, shaming, and general awfulness—from both parties—until the guy admitted he’d voted for Trump and she ended the conversation.
The screenshots were shared as a way of saying how bad the dating pool is out there—the guy being made out, obviously, to be the bad one, the woman, blameless.
While I affirm the fact that the dating pool out there is, in fact, pretty awful, I was reminded of the latest season of Love is Blind1 where several of the female contestants said no to their partners, who they genuinely seemed to love, because of politics, namely, that the women were progressive and the men were not. I affirm the women’s felt need to be with a partner they could respect across the board, but I find the rapid jump to “Which way did you vote?” to be sad at the least, alarming at the most. It might feel like a shortcut to understanding a person’s values, but ultimately, it undermines what is valuable about relationships in the first place.
It is a consumer’s question, not a lover’s question. It aims to consume a relationship—and a person—instead of entering into the valuable work of loving a person for however short or long they are in your life, and loving them into a more full person.
When I met Nate in the foyer of the church we were both attending ten years ago, there was no explicit promise to one another that we would never change theologically, politically, or in other ways.