0736910808
Trade Paperback
250 pages
May 2003
Harvest House

Finding a Lasting Love

Excerpt:

Finding A Lasting Love

by Dick Purnell

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

Copyright © 2003 by Dick Purnell
Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon 97402
All rights reserved.
ISBN 0-7369-1080-8

The Search for a Love Worthy of Your Life
The Foundation for a Lasting Love

Part One: A Balanced Relationship Star
Components of Oneness
Your Social Life: Having Real Fun
Your Mental Life: Discovering How You Think
Your Emotional Life: Understanding Your Feelings
Your Physical Life: Expressing Love Creatively
Your Spiritual Life: Exploring Your Souls

Part Two: Hindrances to a Lasting Love
Shutting Off Transparency
Pressing for Instant Intimacy
Saying Yes and Being Sorry
Expecting Only Time to Heal

Part Three: Becoming the Right Person
Build Qualities That Attract
Keep on the Right Path to the Right One
Notes

1

The Search for a Love Worthy of Your Life

When I wrote the first edition of this book (titled Becoming a Friend and Lover), I began by telling a story about Mark, a friend of mine who dated a lot but was becoming frustrated trying to find the right woman. In the 1980s, Mark fit perfectly into the dating scene—years ago, people actually went out on dates. These days, dating looks quite different, and for many singles, the dating scene is frustrating for a completely different reason.

Courtney is a single woman in her mid-20s who says the idea of two people going out on a real date has ceased to exist in the twenty-first century. Instead, the dating scene involves “going out, meeting someone, going home with them, and then...well, you know,” she says.

Has dating really reached so low? Are the opportunities to form meaningful relationships really being replaced by meaningless physical encounters?

In a USA Today editorial, writer Laura Vanderkam pointed out that the custom of “hooking up,” defined as any physical encounter without expectations afterward, “pervades college culture” and that dates are “passé” She bases her opinion on a study by author David Brooks about the dating scene among college kids today at Princeton University. According to him, this generation is full of what he calls “organization kids” —people whose parents have so flooded their lives with scheduling, pressure to succeed, and extracurricular activities that “they no longer have hours to spend wooing a lover.” Instead, they hook up, and as Vanderkam points out, “hookups do satisfy biology, but the emotional detachment doesn’t satisfy the soul.”

Something seems to have gone very wrong somewhere along the line. Mark would probably be shocked. According to Courtney, despite her desire to date someone, few people are actually dating. “It’s very exciting when one of my friends meets someone and has a date! It’s a privilege!” she says. Single people today still desire to be valued and cared for by someone special and, ultimately, to have a committed, lasting relationship.

“Commitment is important to me, and I think to probably everyone because everyone wants someone to be committed and faithful to them. We all want to be loved,” Courtney says.

If you’re like Courtney—an adult, not married, and possibly not even dating someone seriously—it’s hard to feel fulfilled. I know. I was single until the age of 42. Married people constantly told me that I needed to get married and settle down in order to find fulfillment in my life. Yet when I looked at the married people around me and their problems, I knew that marriage didn’t automatically bring lasting satisfaction. It took something more than a wedding to do that.

So for years, I tried to ignore all the good-hearted encouragement to marry. During that time, I dated several women, but I was so involved in my work that I didn’t feel an overwhelming desire to marry any of them and face the potential of trading one set of problems for another. Although my work gave me great satisfaction and I saw no immediate reason for marrying, I did sense a desire to open my life to someone. I wanted to find out what another person was like and to have that person to know what I was like. But did I dare open myself to another person and risk my future happiness?

In my late 20s, I began to experience deep struggles and frustrations about being single. At times I would open my heart to a woman, but if the relationship didn’t go anywhere or broke apart, I felt betrayed. I had given out personal information about myself, but the other person had walked away from it, not wanting to know more of me. Rejected again. At times, I was afraid that I might never find someone to love and that no one would ever love me.

Like me, many single adults want to develop an intimate relationship that won’t fail or break up. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce—who wants to become a part of that statistic? Some divorcees, after having tried to make their marriage work and failed, sense such a deep insecurity that they may feel incapable of developing another serious relationship.

You approach someone with subtle attempts at conversation. Instead of responding, the other person uses your remarks as an excuse to voice his or her own opinions. Two people merely talking without communicating from their hearts—a good definition of “boring.” Words without a heart. You turn away, thinking, Oh, what’s the use? and that’s that. Superficial conversations at parties, clubs, work, and church leave you empty.

Sometimes you just sit at home alone, feeling unloved and unlovable, convinced that you are incapable of any type of significant relationship. Maybe you even go through the pity-party syndrome.

Recently I counseled a girl named Taylor about her longings for an intimate relationship with a man. While on a trip, she wrote to me, saying, “Unless I’m dating a man seriously, I don’t feel much like a person. Oh, I know my parents and friends love me, but I want something much deeper. I see my friends walking arm in arm with their boyfriends, but all I can do is appreciate such romantic scenes from a distance. I have never experienced that closeness and joy, that electrifying oneness. I need a sense of hope and courage that someday I’ll have that, too.”

Losing Hope

Some singles live with a lack of hope, a feeling that an enjoyable, fulfilling, committed marital relationship is impossible. They have seen or experienced the devastation of divorce. Where can you find quality love that lasts until death separates you?

After I spoke at a conference in Washington, a man said to me, “You advocated building love on a strong foundation of commitment. But what is commitment? I have a hard time committing myself to someone for even one date! Whenever I’m on a date, I keep looking around at other women and become dissatisfied with the one I’m dating.”

Often singles project their past or present failures into the future. They think, I’ve had other relationships that have failed. I guess my future relationships won’t last either. So, although they have a desire to relate intimately with someone, they give up.

This was the case with Emily, a young woman who was being treated for depression and was convinced that beginning a relationship was futile.

“Why should I try to start a relationship?” she asked. “It will only fail, end, and hurt.”

A Big Cover-Up

Obviously, most people don’t go to Emily’s extreme, but many give up on finding lasting satisfaction in relationships. They desperately want intimacy but don’t know how to get it. Other singles focus on romantic, superficial relationships for all their satisfaction and fulfillment. They have read or heard that romantic, sexual love is the ultimate answer. But when they get involved in that part of the relationship, they fail to experience lasting fulfillment. They think that if romance is in their lives, they will be happy. But relationships don’t work out that way. One person, even a spouse, can’t fill all your needs and never was meant to.

A search for romance and sexual involvement is often a cover-up for hurt and an inability to get close to someone mentally and emotionally. Sometimes those who seek fulfillment in superficial liaisons have had painful relationships in the past:

A potential love relationship ended in disappointment and broken dreams.
Just when needed, a close friend rejected them or didn’t care to understand.
They were physically or sexually abused.
Their parents were unhappily married or got divorced.
No one at home seemed to reach out or care for them as children.

A person who has experienced these kinds of losses and hurts is less likely to reach out to others, fearful of ever being close to anyone again. In some cases, the person never learns how to have a deep relationship with someone else.

The Pain of Rejection

For many years, my friend Brad was unable to relate with anyone in a caring way. He only wanted to use other people to meet his own needs. He remembers watching television one evening at the age of nine while hearing the familiar sounds of a parental argument in the next room.

This time Brad also heard doors slam. Finally, his father marched through the living room carrying two suitcases. Brad ran to his dad, clung to him, and tried to pull him back from the door. “Get away,” his dad shouted. “I’ve got to go. I refuse to live with your mother any longer!”

For years after his dad walked out, Brad felt only hurt and pain. He thought that if his father would leave him, other people would, too. In high school and college, Brad used women for his own selfish desires, never letting anyone get close to his sensitive heart. He never wanted to be rejected again.

A lot of years passed, but slowly Brad began to trust people again, to open himself to others whom he found to be trustworthy. He is still learning how to be intimate with others. Now over 30 years old, he has hopes of finding that certain someone with whom he can trust his whole self for a lifetime.

Alison was 47 years old when she got married. For many years, marriage never seemed desirable. Every marriage in her immediate family had been an unhappy one, some ending in divorce. Since childhood, the happiest family member she had known was an unmarried aunt. While Alison had a poor view of marriage, she did have a role model for happy single adulthood. So although friends encouraged her to marry, Alison decided to find happiness as a single person, like her aunt. Determined that she could be both single and fulfilled, she set out to prove it.

Did it work? Yes, until the right person came along. But it was after God had shown Alison many happy marriages among her Christian friends. Then she discovered that a fulfilling marriage was not only possible, but even possible for her . She had not been raised to know how to find fulfillment in close relationships. But over her long years of single adulthood, she did learn, through the Lord’s guidance, how to relate to and trust friends, relatives, and coworkers in ever-deepening friendships.

Alison’s first priority in intimacy is now her husband, but those other significant relationships make her marriage all the more fulfilling. They fill up the areas that her marriage relationship wasn’t meant to fill. They were the training ground for the deep fulfillment in love and intimacy, through being both a friend and lover to her husband, that she has found in marriage.

Intimacy Includes Risk

If love and intimacy are so fulfilling, why do so many married and single people have difficulty finding them—not just male-female love, but love between close friends of the same sex, love between siblings, love between parents and children? What is so attractive and yet so fearful about loving people? What is the difference between loving a sport, loving a car, loving a pet, or even loving God, and that kind of love between persons that deeply satisfies our hearts and souls?

The difference has to do with emotional intimacy and the risk of rejection. You don’t need to worry about rejection when you love something that is as impersonal as sports or your car. Impersonal things won’t turn on you or misunderstand. Only in our imaginations can a love relationship with another person be without risk of rejection and loss.

When we face reality, we know that the love of another person involves risk. C.S. Lewis describes two basic kinds of love: need-love and gift-love. We need the love of others. But we also want to give love to others. Both types of love involve the danger of being rejected. The other person can accept our gift-love but refuse to love us back. In this way, he or she refuses to satisfy our need-love. The other person also can grant us need-love, but have such a sense of self-sufficiency that he or she refuses to allow us the satisfaction of gift-love.

We Need to Love and Be Loved

We all need to love and accept the love of other people. Even though we talk about being self-sufficient, we are made by God with a need to connect with others. You can be deeply involved in your job, become successful, and increase your income and status. At the same time, if you only experience loveless coexistence with others, the satisfaction you might have from your job or other endeavors is spoiled.

Why do we search for intimacy, for closeness and oneness? The answer is that we want to share ourselves with someone and to be accepted for just who we are. We are inadequate to rely totally upon ourselves. Intimacy is more than loving and being loved; it also helps us grow and develop as persons.

Desperation

At times, I desperately yearned for this type of closeness. During one cold January I became so anxious to get married that I lamented, “If I don’t find a woman I want to marry by the first of September, I’m going to explode.” The closer that date came, my frustration level increased. Finally, it was August 1, then August 15, and still there was no potential Mrs. Purnell on the horizon. September came and went. I felt empty and bewildered. What is the solution?

As a single person grows older, more of his or her friends drop out of the single world into marriage. This can make a person feel desperate enough to try crazy things.

I came to that point. I was scheduled to speak at a series of meetings in Dallas, Texas. About a month before my arrival, I phoned my friend Andy, who lived in the city. “Do you know a woman I could date for a big event on my day off?” He suggested we get two other couples to join us. It sounded like fun. We eagerly planned the night of nights.

When I arrived, Andy told me the woman he had in mind couldn’t make it, but his girlfriend Jenny volunteered to find someone else for me. Immediately I was skeptical. I’ve always ended up disappointed with blind dates arranged by women. “She has a great personality” was usually the kindest thing that could be said about the arranged matchup.

My skepticism turned to horror when I discovered that Jenny didn’t even know the woman she had gotten as my date. A friend of Jenny’s had recommended her. The situation looked bleak indeed. To break the tension, Andy and I joked about how miserable my evening was about to become.

That night three couples and I piled into a large SUV and drove to the condominium where my blind date lived. I had everyone line up at her front door, with me standing in the back. That way, while she met the other people, I’d check her out and decide what I thought the evening was going to be like.

When the door opened, there stood an attractive blonde. Brooke, a flight attendant for a large airline company, was not only good-looking but interesting to talk with. I’m sure the other guys were jealous of me that night as Brooke and I talked and talked. I was thoroughly excited about the evening and showed it. Meanwhile, I thought, This is it—the first time ever that a blind date has worked out for me! I asked her for another date, but she was already tied up. Several times during the next few days I asked her out, but she was always busy. I never got the hint.

On my speaking trip the following month, I spotted Brooke in the Atlanta airport. She didn’t seem to show much response to my greeting. Of course, she was busy working at the time, but it took a while for me to realize that Brooke really didn’t want to go out with me again. When it finally hit me, all my dreams of dating and developing a relationship with this exciting person went out the window. I was blind to her disinterest. Some dreams die hard.

Missing the Point

Like others, I had such a desire for intimacy that just a glimmer of hope had caused me to pin all my dreams on one meeting. When it didn’t work out, I crashed.

Later on, I realized I needed to learn how to develop and sustain a love relationship. I had missed the whole concept of friendship! No one ever told me! Having close friends eases the pain of the search for that potential love. Then, when that person does come along, we’ve already learned how to develop a lasting, fulfilling relationship. When many of our needs are met through other relationships, we will not expect that individual to meet more of our needs than one person is capable of doing. Our experience in developing closeness with our friends will make the building of a quality love relationship with a person of the opposite sex less stressful and a lot more rewarding.

This book is written to help you develop a close, exciting friendship with someone of the opposite sex that will become the basis for a lasting love.

Unfortunately, our society has changed the word “lover” to refer often to someone who sexually excites you, especially a person with whom you are not married. I prefer to define a lover as a person who has founded a quality love relationship on biblical principles—a relationship filled and overflowing with the dynamic love that only God can give a man and woman for each other.

Excerpted from Finding A Lasting Love By Dick Purnell. Copyright © 2003 by Harvest House Publishers. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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