Does Love Make You Weak?

I started my day with a bit of Bacon recently; no, not the flesh food, but an essay by Sir Francis Bacon,[1] the renowned British philosopher. His essay about love made me do a double take; for all his purported wisdom, he thought of love as a needless distraction—a weakness—that destroys otherwise useful people.

“They do best,” he wrote, “who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.”[2] 

And then there’s this delightful observation: “It is impossible to love and to be wise.”[3]

He’s hardly alone in his cynicism. In Phaedrus Plato devotes several pages to exploring love as a sort of madness that can destroy you if you don’t master it.[4] Nietzsche described most marriages—those that did not rise to his ideals of wielding power—as “the poverty of the soul in pair,” “this filth of the soul in pair,” and “animals entangled in the heavenly net.”[5] Schopenhauer echoes Bacon: “A person’s being in love often furnishes comic, and sometimes even tragic, phenomena, both because, taken possession of by the spirit of the species, he is now ruled by it, and no longer belongs to himself. ”[6]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that your children are better raised by a cold, impersonal state than you, relished a story of a mother in Sparta who had five sons in the army. When a messenger arrived to tell her that all five boys were dead, she chewed him out: “Base slave, did I ask you that?”

He then told her, “We won the victory,” at which point the mother ran to the temple to give thanks to the gods. Rousseau’s point? The machine of the state is far more important than the love relationships found in a family.[7]

I’m tempted to discard the testimony of these killjoys as the testimony of people who have been burned badly in the pursuit of relationships. They were philosophers, a class of scholars historically known to sometimes think of the passions of ordinary people as the unenlightened pursuits of the ignorant. Across the centuries some of them seem to be warning us that love is a distraction from your true purpose . . . and it therefore makes you weak.

“For however esteemeth too much of amorous affection,” Bacon complains, “quitteth both riches and wisdom.”[8]

He does have a point . . . sort of. 

Love Changes Things

When you fall in love, your priorities shift suddenly. When I was in college, we all inwardly moaned when one of our buddies suddenly had a new girlfriend, because we knew there was an excellent chance he’d soon be missing from our social circle—no longer “one of the guys.” Someone else would now be setting his agenda for him. (Of course, we were critiquing the situation as single men, most of us secretly wishing that we also had a girlfriend.)

Love changes you. It changes what you perceive to be important.

Francis Bacon was married to Alice Barnham in 1606, a few short years before he published the aforementioned essay, Of Love. Not surprisingly—given his cynical viewpoint—it was not a happy arrangement; they were soon estranged, and when Francis died in 1626, she didn’t waste much time finding a new husband. Some people believe he married her, not for love, but for money. 

Given his failed experiment with love, his pessimism makes some sense.

But was he right? Are love and marriage distractions from a higher purpose? Historically speaking, even Christians have not always held a positive view, occasionally thinking about procreation as a necessary evil that we must endure to propagate the species. In the twelfth century the Roman Catholic Church officially banned marriage for clergy, suggesting that a priest must be single-minded in order to be effective. (Ironically, some have observed that Rome has often been tougher on marriage than adultery among priests.)

It’s true that falling in love changes your perspective and realigns your priorities. When I met my wife, Jean, a lot of the plans I had immediately went out the window, because they no longer seemed important. (They still don’t.) Everything changes—because you have changed.

To the outsider—to the one who has not known love, or to those who have been burned by it—it will appear (at times) that lovers have lost their capacity for reason. Not every decision you make in conjunction with your spouse is going to appear to make good financial sense. In the home you make daily compromises that don’t make a lot of sense to the purely rational mind. You tone down your own objectives to prioritize someone else’s. You spend money where you wouldn’t otherwise.

Buying flowers? A terrible financial decision; they’re expensive, and they’ll be dead in a matter of days. Buying flowers for Valentine’s Day? Even worse; the prices are suddenly much higher when February rolls around. A card? What a silly waste of money—most of them will end up in the trash! A house that has a shop on the property? What a waste of money—just work on your motorcycle in the kitchen!

Love changes what you perceive to be important.

From a purely materialistic perspective, none of it makes sense. But from God’s perspective? It makes incredible sense. Couples have a new worldview, because they are no longer just one person. And of course, until you’ve lived it, you cannot make sense of it.

While Bacon was cynical, he did prompt me to contemplate the nature of God Himself: He is three persons in one God. A lot of things that He wants—or does—don’t make sense to sinful human hearts, because we are by nature selfish. We will instinctively put self first—as Francis Bacon (and most of the aforementioned philosophers) apparently did. It’s a bit of a paradox: Our drive to seek love is overwhelming, but at the same time, our selfish nature struggles to understand why anybody would do so. 

Love’s Lessons

If we weren’t biologically hardwired to seek a spouse—if we operated purely rationally—you’d have to wonder how many would still do it. Sure, it might make economic sense to some, and it can provide a convenient division of labor in a household—but if we weren’t driven to love by our God of love, would we still do it?

God has given us romantic love as a sort of classroom to help us understand the universe as He does. It helps us see humanity as God sees us, and encourages us to wrap our minds around His relationship to the church. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,” Paul wrote, “and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31, 32, ESV).

When we first start to read Scripture, we find some of it confusing. We find God’s priorities and we flinch, because what God deems to be important often steps on our prideful toes. We struggle to understand why God perceives things so dramatically differently than we do. Unrepentant sinners think they look just fine; God decidedly disagrees.

Perhaps part of the reason that God’s thoughts are so much higher than ours (see Isa. 55:9) is that He does not view the universe alone. Yes, He is one God—the Scriptures are clear about that (see Deut. 6:4)—but at the same time, He is three distinct persons. God exists—and has always existed—in community. It’s about what you would expect from a God who defines Himself as love (1 John 4:8).

When your heart is saturated with self, it proves very difficult to understand the mind of God—just as Mr. Bacon had trouble understanding why anybody would choose marriage over other things. At one point he bemoaned the fact that soldiers pursue love, and compared it to getting drunk. “Perils,” he explained, “commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.”[9] Love, he believed, was just one more drug you could use to escape reality and numb the pain of life.

In his disappointment Francis told us that it is impossible to love and be wise at the same time. But from God’s perspective, the opposite is true: to love is to be wise, and to learn the mind of God. That, I would suggest, is the real reason that we are willing to risk so very much in the pursuit of it: we are not just seeking companionship, but unconsciously trying to reconnect with the very heart and mind of God. 

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord’ ” (Jer. 9:23, 24, ESV).

[1] This is word play: in English, bacon is a cut of pork.

[2] Francis Bacon, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 358, 359.

[3] Ibid., p. 358.

[4] See Phaedrus, sections 237-241.

[5] Friederick Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), p. 70.

[6] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, chap. 44, p. 554. (Function). Kindle Edition.

[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or On Education (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 40.

[8] Bacon, p. 358.

[9] Ibid., p. 359.