The "Right Person" Myth...

During the month of February, we are going to look at the idea of love and lasting relationships. And regardless of your age and stage of life, regardless of your marital status, this series of posts is designed to bring you to the place where you are better equipped to experience love and lasting relationships.

Today, I would like for us to address and attack perhaps the most prominent and powerful myth about love and lasting relationships. This myth is celebrated by our culture and spread by Hollywood. The myth that I would like to address and attack is the right person myth. You see, as far as our culture is concerned, the secret to finding love and lasting relationships is to find the right person. If you would just find the right person everything else would fall into place.

And this myth is the central theme to almost every romantic comedy made in Hollywood. So let’s take a minute and expose the myth of the right person. To help us do that, I just want you to take a minute and think of your favorite romantic comedy movie. Guys, if you are like me and are not into chick flicks, think of the last romantic comedy movie that you were forced to watch. Do you have a movie in mind? Now think of the plot of that movie as we look together at the right person myth.

The first step to love and lasting relationships according to the right person myth is that you have to find the right person. You need to be on the lookout; you need to be on the hunt; you need to be scoping out all the potential candidates. You need to be at the right place at the right time to find the right person. You need to be wearing the right clothes, you need to work out and stay in shape, you need to look and act the right way.  

Then, according to the right person myth, after you find the right person, the second step is to fall in love. For the right person to be the right person, there has to be love there; there has to be that ooey, gooey feeling; you heart just beats faster around them; you can’t stop thinking about them; there just has to be that chemistry. There has to chemistry emotionally. And there has to be chemistry physically. You know that chemistry that you just can’t keep your hands off of one another. There is an uncontrollable passion to be together and to “be together”.

Then, according to the right person myth, after you find the right person, after you fall in love, the third step is to fix your hopes and dreams on that person for fulfillment. Because the right person will meet all of your needs. The right person will be that knight in shining armor that will fill that empty space in your life and satisfy the deepest desires in your life.

But what happens if the person you are with does not meet all your needs and fulfill all the deep desires of your life? Well, according to the right person myth, then you have not found the right person. Who you thought was the right person was really the wrong person. According to the right person myth, the key question becomes “Is he/she the right person for me?”.

And if it was not the right person, then according to the right person myth, the relationship “was just for a season”, “guess it was not the right one”,  or “he or she’s not coming through for me”. So, if the relationship does not work out, then you simply go back to step one and begin to search again for the right person.

Now, let me ask you this question: Have I just described the plot of the romantic comedy that came to your mind? Is that not the plot of almost every movie from Hollywood? You see, this myth is celebrated by our culture and spread by Hollywood. But unfortunately the right person myth is just that, a myth. And the reason why the right person myth is a myth is in the results.

Here are some statistics that bear out the utter failure of the right person myth: In 2009 alone approximately 16.4 million relationships ended in a divorce. In addition, the group entitled “divorced” is the fastest growing segment of the population in the U.S.  Finally, 1/3 of divorced women live below the poverty line.  

Now a natural question that comes to mind here is “well Dave, if the right person myth is a myth, then how am I supposed to go about dating so that I can experience love and lasting relationships? If the right person myth is wrong, then what is right? Is there an alternative?” If those questions are going through your mind, I have some good news for you. And that good news is that in a section of a letter that is recorded for us in the Bible called the book of Ephesians, we see a man named Paul provide for us an alternative to the right person myth.

Tomorrow, we will look at that alternative…