Tag Archives: relationships

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Kissing Should Be Different

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I have a quote hanging on my wall from the awesome Donald Miller. It says:

Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves, but they want to be different with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It’s a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn’t want to be anyone else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

I look at it every morning when I wake up. It’s helpful.

It’s pretty interesting to think that if we stopped concentrating on one form of “different” we would be another form of “different.” I wonder what it would be like to live a life without cues where interactions with people aren’t just artful re-imaginings of television shows or movies we’ve seen.

I found this video the other day. It’s a promo for TLC’s new show Virgin Diaries. It follows people who have saved sex for marriage getting married and doing other adult things.

A lot of people find this clip funny, and I guess I do too. But the reason we find it funny is because we think we know what the perfect kiss looks like.  Really, though? We know what the perfect kiss should look like? Where’d we get that information? When we kiss, we aren’t watching; we are doing. And so that means our ideas of the perfect kiss come from when we observe kisses. We don’t typically go around watching our friends kiss so that means we learn what kissing looks like from movies and television shows.

All of this just seems really silly. Kissing isn’t about what it looks like to others. It’s about two people enjoying each other. And that’s really nice.

That’s why I think the above clip is probably a purer kiss than I will ever experience (even barring the fact that they were each other’s first kiss). These two people are not trying to live up to an ideal. They are doing what they want. They are different.

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If I Ever Get to Be On That MTV Show About Being Seventeen I Will Tell This Story

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Once when I was seventeen, I ran my family’s car into the side of the road. As far as I know, it’s the only thing I ever did that could be chalked up to stupid adolescent behavior, the only thing that ever got me into big trouble with my parents. I have never been pulled over by the cops; I have never sneaked out of the house after curfew; and I have never otherwise been caught doing anything rebellious or bad. And I would have gotten away with running the family’s car into the side of the road if it wasn’t for the fact that I dented the front bumper pretty noticeably.

Now, normally, seventeen-year-old  Spencer was all into being overly upset about mistakes he made. But on this particular night, I was with my girlfriend and trying to look grown-up and I was remembering all of the crazy stories my parents had told me about when they were kids. We laughed about those. So I figured this would be a laughing matter.

I called my parents and laughed through most of the conversation. My parents weren’t laughing, though.

Life did not progress all that well from there that night.

Tonight, I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant, and the woman in front of me asked for a large cup for water. Expecting the cashier to not be cool with this, the woman launched into a five-minute explanation of what had led her to ask for a large cup of water. It was loaded with too much information.

That woman and seventeen-year-old me have a lot in common. We both thought that we knew the reaction of the person we were communicating with. And in both cases, it didn’t work out well.

I pull punches all the time. I pepper my conversation with words and phrases and attitudes that I think will make the information easier or more acceptable for the person I’m talking to. It never does.

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God’s Eternal Relationship

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Surprisingly, I’m incredibly stubborn from time to time. This frustrates my friends to no end because often, we will have long discussions in which I refuse to change my mind about something only to change my mind several days later when I have had time to read, write, and think about the subject in question. That’s why before I write this post, I should apologize to a couple of people who have been trying to tell me the following conclusions for quite some time.

I just finished this book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. The argument of the book is that dating is a broken vehicle for finding real love and romance. I’m still not sold on that whole idea. But I must say that the alternative Harris gives is very very attractive. He says if we actively stay away from dating, if we fill our time with other things glorifying to God, then God will take care of the rest.

A couple of nights ago I had a very long argument with a couple of good friends about this concept, though. If I choose to actively ignore romantic relationships with members of the opposite sex, how am I ever supposed to meet anyone? My friends accused me of not trusting God. I do struggle with trusting God. I struggle with trusting in general. But I can at least intellectually and rationally understand trusting someone or God when their behavior follows the rules of logic.

I can trust God with my career because while I am waiting for it to become obvious what I am supposed to spend the rest of my life doing, I can go to school and learn. And at the end of my time in school, I am going to apply to a bunch of different grad schools and jobs and see where God and life take me. But I don’t think that’s what I am supposed to do with dating.

So I was about half way through Harris’s book; I was thinking about quitting it because I didn’t think I would ever figure out how to properly think about what he was saying; and then I thought about Boethius. Boethius is kind of a strange writer to think about when you are thinking about romantic relationships.

Boethius was pretty wise.

Boethius wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy in the 6th century. In it, he gives a pretty famous argument for reconciling free will with God’s omniscience: he calls it God’s eternal moment. For Boethius, God experiences and sees all of eternity in one moment, in one snap of His Almighty fingers. Boethius is important to dating because to God, everyone who is single is also already with their spouse. For God, there is no waiting. Everyone is already in the arms of people who love them.

So that’s how it works, maybe.