More Precious Than Gold

How the Modern Love Section of the New York Times So Desperately Needs Jesus

File:Mary, Lady Guilford (1527) Hans Holbein d. J. (Saint Louis Art Museum).jpg - Wikimedia Commons—Otherwise known as my soul contemplating the Modern Love Section of the New York Times

If it weren’t for the New York Times, on Tuesdays I would have nothing to write about. Thankfully, they are pretty much always there for me. All I have to do is click around and find something so silly, that I barely have to lift my finger over my keyboard to explain where they’ve gone wrong. Like this thing. It’s called “I Wanted to Crave Him, Not Have Him: Our intense connection fit no category. Would we be allowed to keep it?” and it’s by Lei Wang. It starts out this way:

One of the most intimate relations in Chinese culture is known as the “zhiji” — the “know-self,” one who knows you like you know yourself. This is a connection outside of any social role, something beyond even best-friendship, like a platonic soul mate. The Chinese describe the feeling a know-self inspires as different from friendly, romantic or familial feelings: It is considered a fourth kind of feeling. It is friendship with a certain spark, but not quite romance — the ideal spiritual relationship. In a song whose title translates to “Blue Know-Self,” the Chinese singer Chen Rui sings about a feeling that is “Not the clinging of a lover but lingering like wine.” Not oceanic passion but “a faint yearning, like a small blue river with tiny waves.”

Ok, so, I don’t know really anything of substance that would be worth relating about Chinese culture and so I don’t want to just launch in and say that everything Mme. Wang is saying is wrong. I expect she is completely right, and may even be considered an expert on this subject. I don’t know her. Also, I believe in deep respect for other cultures and languages, and that we ought not just launch in and start strewing judgments around like so much Halloween Candy. But there are two reasons why it will be totally ok for me to wander up and down over this piece, explaining how it is so terrible. The first is that it’s the New York Times Modern Love Section and the writer is attempting to communicate with a Western Audience who doesn’t know xer’s right hand from they’s left hand. Also, she is going to pull C.S. Lewis into the morass, so I feel no apology needs to be extended.

Anyway, we carry on:

My know-self and I met at a summer writing camp where we spent four hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks, reading and commenting on each other’s writing. Everybody in our workshop knew that he and I loved each other’s stories, which meant we loved each other’s souls. I knew from the beginning that he had a long-term partner and that it was not possible between us, in the traditional way. But we got close. Know-selves are rare: The ancient Chinese believed that to find even one in the world was more difficult than finding 10,000 pieces of gold.

So first off, I think it’s possible to love someone’s writing without knowing very much at all about that person’s soul. I am really loving Richard Burton’s Footsteps in East Africa, for example, but when I looked him up on Wiki I discovered he was a very bad man I was happy to admit to myself that I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed his soul at all. That blithe declaration—”he and I loved each other’s stories, which meant we loved each other’s souls” is like saying, “I don’t believe in God anymore because I really want to have sex with my boyfriend.” It sounds clever but it isn’t.

And we know that this person isn’t that clever because she knew “from the beginning” that he had a long-term partner. Right away we can be sure that she is throwing the term “platonic” around as a whole lot of Cope. What they had was so special, you guys, so rare—more difficult than finding 10,000 pieces of gold.

I have lost platonic friends to marriages before, and this felt more than platonic, though less than romantic. I wanted to find a precedent for it, but even among my unconventional friends, I couldn’t find a model of the kind of intimacy I wanted that did not involve sex, dating or polyamory. The origin of platonic love wasn’t defined by sexlessness; it was defined foremost by love. What we call platonic now was actually the highest rung of Plato’s Ladder of Love, which ran from lowly love of the earthly to love of the celestial — love in its most spiritual form. My know-self and I both wanted this celestial love, to sublimate our summer crush feelings into something pure.

Why do I have the feeling that this person has probably read even less Plato than I have? Also, I love that we’re in a world where we can “find a model” for “a kind of intimacy” that we prefer. By which I mean that I don’t love it, that it actually breaks my heart. Mme. Wang should be living in a secure world where she knows who she is, where she has a sensible and satisfying job, where her obligations to her family, church, and God consume her attention and, to be honest, wear her out. She shouldn’t have to wander around making hash of Lewis and Plato—not to betray my sex or socio-economic level or anything. I do love being a member of the laptop class.

Not to change the subject or anything, but my children bought me one of those folding bed trays for my birthday so that when I wake up at the derriere of dawn to write I do not have to be overheated by the hot engine on my ancient silver HP Envy that makes a little crackling noise when it feels like it. How well they know me. It’s like we share some kind of spiritual love or something. Anyway, now comes the Lewis bit:

After all, according to C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves,” in which he describes the traditional Greek notions of storge, philia, eros and agape (family, friend, erotic and godly love), it is not so impressive to love someone you already like. It is more impressive, divine even, to resist your dislike for someone and love them anyway. If true, wouldn’t it be extremely impressive to resist romance with someone who sparks romantic feelings and love them in a godlier way?

Goodness, how disappointing 2024 is. Here is the New York Times and some random content provider searching around online for CS Lewis and Plato quotes. It could have been so amazing. She could have read Narnia, or the Space Trilogy, or even Mere Christianity. Instead, dare I even suggest it? I imagine someone helped her find something from Good Reads to shove in to make the essay hold together. Not that I even know or would ever ever do anything like that.

Isn’t this brilliant? Agape—did you know?—is to resist your dislike for someone and love them anyway. Thoughts and Prayers. And so wouldn’t it be so “impressive” to resist romance with someone who sparks romantic feelings and “love them in a godlier way.” What do you suppose “godlier” means in this sentence? I ask because things are about to get much worse:

Rhaina Cohen, who wrote “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center,” spoke on the podcast about how there is no term for a relationship that transcends the conventional language for friendship (“zhiji,” I want to tell her, though even “zhiji” is more a recognition of the soul than a prioritizing of circumstances). Ms. Cohen described a friend who lives in an intentional co-living community who acknowledged the complications of such a life but chooses “the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection.” I wanted to be among his invariables. But his wife was already his invariable, and after a few months of daily texting — months in which we truly were friends but were making plans to see each other briefly over the holidays — she felt hurt by our closeness, and he did not want to hurt her.

Gosh, I’m glad that after months of texting this guy finally decided he didn’t want to hurt his wife. Did you catch that? At first it was just a “partner.” Now it is a “wife.” Either way this guy should be allowed to live in a Billy Graham Rule world, which after the shame and humiliation of Steve Lawson, as someone pointed out on X, remains undefeated.

If I were his wife and I found out that some lady out there “loved his soul” and was trying to figure out what words like “godliness” and “agape” meant in connection to him, well, I can’t say what I would do because this is a family-friendly blog and I don’t really believe in violence. Don’t try me, Satan.

What I wanted were the problems of finding a way to keep our connection — perhaps I could meet and even befriend her? — but he did not think those problems were an option. Now we no longer contact each other at all. And I see how this is good of him: a keeping of boundaries, an honoring of his partner’s needs. I see how it is his gift to her, not a sacrifice. But I also see how this gift could be part of the bias of a culture that prioritizes the choosing of one relationship over all others. And when it becomes simply what one is supposed to do, the gift can turn into the mere paying of a debt. I am hopelessly biased, of course: conflict of interest, etc. It is difficult to separate my ideological beliefs from my personal desires. All relationships are built on boundaries that both keep in and keep out. I had wanted an in-betweenness, but perhaps only because we couldn’t and didn’t cross the traditional boundaries.

That’s so funny. Maybe they could be friends! Their “souls” love each other. Man, what a blessing for them all that this guy began to get a clue. Texting for months with some woman who is not your wife is really bad, but at least he figured out how to “build a boundary.”

Goodness, I do feel so sorry for this person. We must skip a lot to discover how very confused she is:

I still don’t know if I am monogamous or polyamorous; it depends on the person and circumstance. I can imagine being sexually exclusive to one person, but I can’t imagine being emotionally exclusive. What I know is that I am tired of being a variable. I would love a life partner, but I wonder how I would explain my “better deal” and how I want to live in a commune one day with my friends and help raise my best friend’s children, come what problems that may. And if my know-self and I ever figure out a friendship, I would have to explain him, too, this person with whom I feel mutual longing though do not need the longing to become something. This more-than-nothing but less-than-something-else. What is the name for that? Perhaps it is better unnamed. All I know is that I want a connection that can hold all of that.

I think I know what this person wants. It’s what everyone longs for. She wants a deep communion with the God who invented the kind of love that we so easily toss around as Christians—Agape. She was designed by that ineffable Being to pour herself out, to give and give and give for the sake of another. For that is what God does. He is Love. That doesn’t mean that he has nice feelings for us. It means that he never ceases to give. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit all perfectly pour themselves out for the other. Out of the great love with which they love came the Creation and then the Redemption of the World. We were made to abide within the strange, godly, miraculous connection whereby we are bound to each other—not by sex, not by selfish, grasping need, but by the God who gives.

There is a “connection” that can hold all that she needs. It is the Body of Christ, the place where we are taught the way of love, where we are bound by love to each other and to God.

And this is where a great, soul-level pity should emerge. For sex between a lot of confused strangers, texting relationships, polyamory, nonmonogamy, and everything in between vaguely mimics the real thing. When you, as a Christian, come across another Christian who you do not know and have never met before, isn’t there a gracious acceptance that you can communicate just by looking into each other’s eyes? Don’t you discover the alien power to spend yourself for the sake of someone you don’t even know that well? Don’t you find yourself hunched over the church kitchen sink scrubbing dishes for people you don’t even have opinions about except that often they annoy you? Haven’t you sometimes forgiven people who said things that struck you to the heart, forgiven them so completely that you can’t even remember what it was that so hurt you? Perhaps you have laid awake at night praying with all your soul for the safety of someone, for healing for a name you have only read in the back of the bulletin. Maybe you have even wept at the funeral of a stranger hearing those haunting yet comforting lines,

Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

Which is to say, perhaps we could say a prayer for Lei Wang, who’s name I don’t even know how to pronounce, that the Lord who emptied himself, who left his glory, his rights, and his throne and came all the way down here to know us would gather her to himself.

Have a nice day!