Novel Romance
by digby
You learn something new every day. According to certain theologians, evangelical teaching says that love isn’t a feeling:
The Christian counselors Sanford sought out while trying to decide whether to stay with his wife or jump on a plane to South America advised him what else love is and isn’t. “Their point is that love is not a feeling,” Sanford told The Associated Press in a tearful two-day confessional. “It’s a choice. It’s an action.” That sentiment might seem cold to many Americans, but it is perfectly consistent with the born-again, evangelical Christian world that Sanford inhabits, says sociologist John Bartowski. “What evangelicals are doing is sort of carving out a subcultural view of love which is not so highly romanticized as we see in movies, that is at odds with the dominant view of love,” says Bartowski, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of the book, “Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families.” That world view, he says, “divorces” love from emotion, because “feelings are fleeting and not to be trusted.” “Love is something that is cultivated in the trenches of living a day-to-day relationship,” says Bartowski. “That is not a Hallmark moment.”
I guess the only euphoria allowed is the ecstasy you feel for Jesus.
Not that I feel sorry for Mark Sanford. He’s clearly in the throes of a whopper of a mid-life crisis and it’s very difficult to watch someone you know go through one, much less on the national stage. But I do think I can understand how someone like him gets to this point. Repression will do that to you.
I have no idea what’s gone on in that marriage and even if I did, I’m sure I couldn’t fully understand it. Human relationships are always mysterious to some degree, even to the people involved in them. But some marriages aren’t worth saving and from a distance this one sure looks like one of them to me. And it looks as though Sanford is doing everything his rebellious, guilt ridden subconscious is telling him to do to make it impossible to repair. After reading that article ( which I’m sure is simplistic and theologically shallow and yadda, yadda,yadda) I have to say that a little part of me would be gratified if Sanford ends up leaving the whole thing behind and becomes a bartender in Belize or something.
The pleasure nazis are always telling people that nothing but religion and war are allowed to make you feel good. And I just don’t think that human beings are wired to love Jesus and get off on violence alone. I know if it were me, something very fundamental inside me would strike out against all these people telling me that the idea of love and emotional fulfillment in marriage is irrelevant.
The funny thing is that I suppose my position puts me sort of in league with Ross Douthat, the Conservative Catholic Boy Wonder of the NY Times who was just the other day extolling the virtues of the grand passion. But he was saying, naturally, that it’s liberal elites who are a bunch of dried up prigs who have no notion of romance and conservative Real Americans who know how to feel. And perhaps that’s right if what you define as great romance is an 8 1/2 year ilicit affair for which you feel so much giddy excitement and guilt that you end up staging a highly public crash and burn and then submitting yourself to the flaggelation of your tribe. That’s not romance in my book, that’s gothic soap opera. But I guess if you’re Mark Sanford, you take what you can get.
On the other hand, any man over 40 who publicly says stuff like this probably doesn’t deserve any sympathy, because of the turgid dialog alone:
“A whole lot more than a simple affair,” he said. “It’s a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.”
That makes my teeth hurt.
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