Emotional Purity & Broken Heart Syndrome

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

— C. S. Lewis[1]

…great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain – if, indeed, they went together. If there were a choice – and he suspected there was – a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.

—Sheldon Vanauken[2]

One young woman named Felicity wrote to me about her failed courtship experience. The relationship had been set up by the two sets of parents and was done exactly ‘by the book.’ (One of their ‘dates’ was actually a trip to one of Gothard’s seminars accompanied, of course, by the entire family.) The only area where it differed from the ideal courtship scenario was the fact that the young man named Trevor happened to still be in love with his former girlfriend, who had gone off with another guy. During the courtship Trevor admitted to Felicity that he was still in love with his former girlfriend, but this didn’t bother Felicity. Nor did it bother Felicity that Trevor did not even seem to particularly like her. As Felicity later wrote when reflecting over the whole episode,

Since this didn’t seem to be a problem in my parents’ eyes, I saw nothing unusual with marrying a man whose heart belonged to another, and who was not deeply interested in or attracted to me. Of course, since we weren’t supposed to love each other until after we were engaged it was almost an advantage that we didn’t have a lot of emotional attraction for each other.

So what eventually happened with Felicity and Trevor? Fortunately, the courtship did not lead to marriage, but not through any unwillingness on Felicity’s part. Felicity wrote afterwards that she was quite willing to marry Trevor, even though she didn’t love him.

I told God that whichever way it turned out, I would be fine. If Trevor and our parents wanted me to marry him I would say yes, but if not I wouldn’t mind ending the courtship. I really didn’t care which way it went and was willing to live with whatever was decided for me, as my parents indirectly encouraged me to do (telling me to leave it up to God and not push it, etc.).

Felicity is now happily married to a man she deeply loves and who deeply loves her. Every time she remembers her courtship with Trevor she sees God’s hand of protection on her life. She is so thankful that Trevor decided to pull out of the courtship, even though this was to the great disappointment of both sets of parents. “It’s rather sad,” writes Felicity, “that the system and people who were supposed to be protecting me and making sure that I didn’t make a poor decision were willing to let me marry into a situation like that.”

To most people in our culture, the prospect of spending the rest of your life united to a person who is in love with somebody else (and who does not even particularly like you) is far from a desirable prospect, to state the matter mildly. However, to someone who has grown up to imbibe what I call a ‘courtship mentality’, such a prospect not only doesn’t seem strange, but in some sense seems to make things easier. Recall that Felicity said that it was almost as an advantage that she and Trevor didn’t have any emotional attraction for each other since it is only during the engagement period that authorization for falling in love occurs. The ideological backdrop to this concept of authorization is found in the doctrine of ‘emotional purity’, which I would now like to consider.

‘Emotional Purity'

“Purity…” writes John Thompson, “means no physical affection or romantic emotions prior to God’s approval.”[3] Now it is one thing to argue against physical affection prior to ‘God’s approval’ - which in Thompson’s phraseology refers to parental authorization – but no romantic emotions? Yet, like it or lump it, that is exactly what is meant by emotional purity: complete absence of romantic emotions, thoughts, desires or aspirations, until the father says ‘Go!’

I have a friend named Emily who had always accepted the teaching about emotional purity and believed that to have a crush on a boy amounted to nurturing an idol in her heart. However, when Emily actually found herself being attracted to a young man, she was helpless to know how to handle it. Nor were matters helped when friends began to come up to Emily and say, “Don’t you know that you are committing emotional fornication? You’re being promiscuous and I think you should be careful to save yourself totally for your future husband.”

In another instance, a lady named Katie told me about the time her a father gave permission for emotional bonding after her courtship period had been officially entered. The problem was, Katie’s father did not give permission for her emotions to be released completely, only somewhat. Katie was still supposed to guard her heart to some extent and not get too emotionally attached. (Katie confessed to me later that she had difficulty figuring out where the line was, but apparently her parents felt she had crossed it.)

Typically, Lindvall manages to find scriptural justification for this odd behavior in the most unexpected parts of the Bible. He appeals to the example of Adam. When, through naming the various animals, Adam realized that he, alone among all the beasts, had no partner, God put him to sleep. Likewise, argues Lindvall, when we get to the age when our interest in the opposite sex is stirred up, God asks us to "go to sleep emotionally!"[4]

The goal here is an ideal of emotional virginity, so that when the marriage finally occurs, both people will not only have never had physical relations with anyone else, but will also be emotional virgins, having never felt anything towards anyone else. “Not only are we to be physically pure,” says Lindvall, “but we need to be emotionally pure in our hearts.”[5]

Just because a person feels an attraction that will not culminate in marriage does not make those emotions impure. ‘Emotional purity’ is therefore a bad term since it presupposes that there is something impure or wrong about these emotions, as if to have such feelings defiles a person in the same way as sexual immorality.

It must be understood that this ideal of 'emotional purity' does not simply mean that young people should reserve the expression of romantic feelings until after the father has authorized it, but that the emotions and thoughts themselves must be stifled prior to parental authorization. As Lindvall clearly states,

I have concluded that God's best for me is to teach my children not to allow themselves to cultivate romantic inclinations toward anyone until they know God has shown them this person is to be their lifelong mate...Ideally they don't even allow themselves to dream about romantic relationships. Certainly there will be struggles, but to the degree that they allow me to protect them from the emotional scars my wife and I bear, they will be spared the regrets we suffer.[6]

Later we shall consider the reasons for Lindvall’s regrets and the effect emotional purity is supposed to have on a marriage. In this essay, however, I want to look at this issue from the point of view of the child.

Lindvall explains, always with enthusiasm, his success in imposing this idea on his own daughter.

At age twelve, I took Bethany out to dinner one evening and presented her with a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant formed like a padlock. There was a small keyhole and an accompanying key. I presented the pendant and necklace to her and asked her to "Give me your heart" (Prov. 23:26). 1 explained that I wanted to keep the gold key as a symbol of her trusting me with her emotions. I specifically asked her to not entertain romantic thoughts toward any young man until she and her mother and I together conclude that he is God's choice to be her husband. (There is scriptural precedent for the young people involved to be consulted and consent to a marriage arrangement.) I explained that at the beginning of her marital engagement I would give the gold key to her betrothed, and that although she might not yet love him, she would then be free to aim her heart toward him. Bethany unreservedly entrusted the symbolic gold key into my care, and with it, her heart.[7]

Some young man is going to come to me and say, 'I believe God wants me to marry your daughter.' And I'll pray about it. And if God shows me the same thing, I'm going to give him that key, and I'm going to say, 'You are authorized, and I'm going to help you woo my daughter, as she will be your help mate forever.'[8]

In that conversation I asked Bethany to take it a little further. I asked her to commit to me that she would not be friends with any fellows. I asked her not to even be friends with boys."[9]

Lindvall started a trend here, and now there is a website that sells “’Heart Necklace with Key’ designed for this very purpose. This is a meaningful symbol of a daughter giving her dad the key to her heart until he gives it to the man selected to be her future spouse. The inscription on the heart is ‘He who holds the key can unlock my heart.’”[10]

One gets the feeling from all this that romantic emotions are something that can be turned on or off like a light switch. Obviously our will does play a part in the process as with everything else, however, very often the romantic feelings, crushes, and infatuations that young people experience are things that, to a large extent, cannot be controlled by the will. What can be controlled is how the person responds to these feelings that can come and go like the wind. To try to tamper with the emotions themselves, however, is bound to be unproductive. The only way to prevent such ‘unauthorized’ emotions from happening would surely be to build monasteries and nunneries to house our youth. When the time for wedding vows does arrive, the vows can directly follow the introductions.

Let us consider what happens when a child reaches puberty. As the whole person struggles to adjust to the hormonal changes that are happening, it is natural that the child will be bombarded with an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations connected with their sexuality. As the body develops, gradually things settle down, though in the case of our sexuality this may not occur for many years.

If a child's first awakenings to the world of sexuality are accompanied by an atmosphere of guilt and negativity, this will almost inevitably effect how that child responds to his or her sexuality later in life. If, however, the child can be helped to view sexual awakening and these intense inner experiences objectively and in an atmosphere of understanding, this may help not only to prevent the child from developing an unnecessary guilt complex, but also deter him or her from thinking that these sensations demand an outlet for gratification and expression. Although children should be helped to see that it is not helpful to voluntarily entertain unhealthy sexual fantasies, this needs to be done in a way so that it does not become more serious in the child's mind than it really is. There is a risk of a phobia developing about sexual or romantic thoughts which could be self-defeating, following the principle that the attempt to obliterate something from our minds necessarily involves making that thing an object of concentration. In the same way that the words, "Do not think of a purple elephant" immediately arouse in the mind the very image we are being told we must not think, so the prohibition of sexual thoughts and feelings can do more to arouse the imagination in these areas than simply ignoring them ever could.

As a young adult I went to a Bible college where a similar mentality operated. I was one among only nineteen other young adults under the burden of over a hundred written and unwritten rules. One such rule was a universal taboo on anything to do with romance. The staff of this school did their best to prevent the young people from anything that might excite them romantically. Every cassette and CD that a student brought to the school was carefully previewed, and if any love songs were found then the album or the song would be banned. The administrator of the school encouraged us to make fun of kissing when it appeared on videos, even mocking the act with disgusting lip noises like prepubescent boys tend to do. When springtime came the young men were given instruction to be extra careful, as this was the season when nature causes the hormones to play up. There was a ban on private letters and phone calls across the sexes, and Lindvall’s lectures were often played at the beginning of term. If one of the staff members noticed that a man and woman were spending too much time together, they would step in and do something. In one such case, where two people actually fell in love, the staff decided this young man and woman shouldn't be allowed to communicate at all with each other, even from their homes during the summer holidays.

The result of so much concentration on not being tempted by love was interesting. The young women often seemed to treat romance as if it was a big joke and could be flirtatious in a flippant way. The consequence of not treating love and romance seriously in the right way, meant that it was treated flippantly in a totally wrong way. I found that there was not the appropriate care taken by the girls concerning how their actions might hurt the males. On the other hand, whenever any interaction with the opposite sex was at all serious, it was pregnant with self-consciousness, introspection and guilt. Furthermore, a psychotherapist has noted that the percentage of sex abuse cases among those who had been to that school was phenomenal - far higher than the percentage among the average non-Christians sector of the population.

Why did these problems arise among those who are instructed so intensely to view romance so cynically and negatively? A similar question might be asked concerning the huge sex scandal that rocked Gothard's Illinois based organization and nearly forced Gothard into retirement.

I believe part of the answer lies in the way these concerns were handled. The devaluation, even the mocking of romance prior to the appropriate time, led to a general misconstruction of romance and love in general. Because these feelings were not aligned to a model of the high and good value of romance, it was very easy to treat them - whether consciously or unconsciously - as things that were sinful; to try to bury them in a dark closet and hope they reemerge as infrequently as possible. Often when a person has undergone this kind of unhealthy repression, it causes the thing that has been repressed to be displaced onto another area of his or her experience, so that the thing that was repressed reemerges with a new shape - a shape that the person does not recognize as stemming from the very area they thought was killed.

Another factor was the false dichotomy between the things of the spirit and the passions of the body, as if they are in competition to each other. You didn’t pursue romance because that took your mind off Christ. We thus had no idea how to give the Lord control of these areas because we expected Him to take them away. These areas were not as important to God as things like Bible memorization, study and prayer meetings and if God was interested in them at all, it was in helping us overcome them.

We also find this false divide between the spiritual world vs. the earthly realm of romance and emotions throughout Lindvall’s teaching. In Lindvall’s newsletter he recently shared a letter from a young man who confessed to “struggling with thinking about a girl” whom he might marry. The man wrote,

I have prayed that God would take these thoughts from me, and have tried to stop thinking them myself, once I become aware that I am thinking about her again…. I am just frustrated, and am feeling powerless against these thoughts. (Even though my mind tells me that I'm wrong, and I do have the power to control them).

Lindvall’s advise to help this man achieve ‘victory’ was that he turn totally to Jesus, fast, pray and try to channel his emotional energy into reading and memorizing scripture. Additionally, Lindvall quoted Colossians 3:2: "Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth."[11] Since the world of romantic emotions is seen as belonging to the inferior realm of “things of the earth”, it is at variance with our pursuit of heavenly things above. A divided field of experience ensues in which a false competition is set up between the spirit and the emotions.

As I found at the Bible college already mentioned, this fragmented and compartmentalized view of our humanity meant that Christ was not Lord of our entire person, and consequently the area of our passions remained outside of His Lordship. Because we were made to feel guilty for even having such emotions, we tended subconsciously to assume that there must be something unclean, dirty, naughty, or impure about this area of life, or else treat it clinically as mere animal instincts. Romance and passion were not viewed as something in which our whole person participates, but treated instead almost like a ‘thing’ external to us that we take on and off. It is always dangerous when life is divided into compartments like this since Christ’s Lordship should permeate all areas of life.[12]

In the rest of this essay I want to explore one of the main arguments used to compel young people to cultivate this negative and unhealthy view of their emotions.

Broken Heart Syndrome

In Best Friends For Life, we read

...one of the great benefits of courtship is that it minimalizes as much as is humanly possible the broken-heart syndrome so many young people experience.

As this quotation indicates, the need to avoid ‘broken-heart syndrome’ is one of the primary motivations behind the courtship method. But to what exactly does ‘broken-heart syndrome’ refer?

This term, ‘broken heart syndrome’ was popularized by Lindvall to describe the painful side of romantic emotions when a person feels that their “heart is broken.” Like the term ‘emotional impurity’, it is a pejorative description that unfairly typifies certain experiences. If the courtship advocates can get us to think of emotional heartache as a ‘syndrome’, then they have nearly won the argument, in so far as a ‘syndrome’ usually implies neurosis.

This is really what we should expect. When romantic love comes under censor, the next step is to take a dim view of the experience of heart broken-ness. For what does a broken heart indicate other than that one has made the fatal mistake of losing control of one's emotions in an experience of romance: that one has extended oneself too far, put too much hope or confidence in another person, slipped from the safe platform of self-control into the unpredictable sea of emotional involvement?

Similar reasons have led counsellors in the secular climate to despise broken hearts. The self-centred consumerist mentality of today has no understanding for an experience which signifies the capacity to lose yourself or feel disappointed - an experience which presupposes that there is a soul that can feel hope, rejection, betrayal, and, yes, love as well.

Sharon Thompson tells us that many girls are unhappy with the casual sex they are expected to have, and the reason for their unhappiness is because they are still "'condition[ing] sexual consent on romantic expectations.'"[13] When one girl was so traumatised by her first experience of premarital sex, the girl vowed to save sex until marriage so she could be sure the relationship meant as much to the man as it did to her. Thompson concludes that by this decision Tracey "'had gone back...to the very same convictions that had set her up to become a victim of love in the first place.'"[14] In other words when we enter into sexual experiences with romantic expectation, we become a victim of our own illusions. Because the romantic 'illusion' has at root assumptions about gender differences, a young girl experiencing a broken heart does not require sympathy – at least according to Sharon Thompson - but instruction, since such a person is engaging in "bids for sympathy and absolution based on assumptions about gender differences so conventional that whole genres turn on them.'"[15] As a solution Thompson suggests girls learn to treat love as something ephemeral and play the field with the kind of emotional detachment that will save them from heartbreak. This is called 'unencumbered sex'.

Although the context is different, the motivation is the same as we find in the courtship movement. Those who push courtship begin the discussion of broken hearted-ness at the same point as Sharon Thompson's, namely, the need to avoid being a victim of the heartache and disappointment that romantic expectation can create. The solution of the former is to encourage all manner of loose behaviour but without the expectation of a secure relationship; the solution of the latter is to try to eradicate any behaviour that might give vent to romantic expectation prior to the security of marriage. In both cases they are trying to avoid what Capon calls “the indulgence of the ultimate risk of giving oneself to another over whom we have no control.”[16] Let's have a closer look at what is being proposed as a solution.

The Solution: Emotional Sterilization

Lindvall draws our attention to the fact that in the typical dating pattern when a person enjoys a series of temporary dating relationships, each relationship must endure a breaking up process before moving on to the next. “However,” writes Lindvall,

As their hearts are wounded, and then heal after each episode, they develop emotional calluses as a defense against the depth of grief that would be useful in motivating married couples to shore up the performance of their union.[17]

The more often they experience this [breaking-up], the more scared their emotions are, and then we wonder why when we marry we have a difficult time becoming vulnerable and open with our husband or our wife.[18]

Israel Wayne has argued similarly, comparing the emotional pain of breaking off a relationship to sticking on and then ripping off a piece of tape on your arm: at first it hurts, but eventually, if you repeat the process long enough, the hairs that originally acted as pain sensors eventually cease to register pain to the brain. Similarly, it is argued, the more we experience the emotional pain of breaking up a relationship, the more desensitized we become. Eventually our emotions become hardened as an instinctive defense against future pain. “It may seem good to have our emotions hardened,” Wayne writes,

but this doesn’t work very well in a marriage. Who wants to have a spouse who is uncaring, unfeeling, and guards themselves so they won’t be hurt? We all want spouses who can freely give and receive love. [19]

The solution that both Lindvall and Wayne give is to reject the typical dating pattern of in/out relationships for the model of emotional purity. Emotional purity guarantees that you won’t get hurt since you don’t release your emotions until it’s safe.

Not for the first or last time, Lindvall and Wayne have presented us with a false dilemma. The choice they give us is between a series of in/out dating relationships vs. shutting down the emotions completely until it is completely ‘safe.’ This gives them the perfect platform to persuade young people to be emotionally ‘pure’, since the young people they are addressing already have an antipathy to the typical pattern of irresponsible relationships. Forced into this false choice, the model of emotional purity is clearly the only option for a biblically-minded young person or parent. It is only after you go deeper into the system that you find that this solution not only excludes irresponsible dating but any unguarded emotions even when experienced within in a biblically responsible relationship. They are not teaching young people that within the context of being honorable towards those of the opposite sex, you are not being sinful, unspiritual or defiled if you have growing feelings for someone; nor are they teaching young people how to approach and deal with such feelings. Instead, they are teaching that romantic feelings, emotional desires and expectations are wrong if felt at anytime while there is still a risk that the object of those desires may not become our future spouse. We must safeguard our life against the potential of any emotional pain in the very first place.

It is interesting that this basic argument hinges, not on an appeal to scripture, but on pragmatic and utilitarian concerns, as it promises to maximize the agent’s future happiness in marriage. We are being told that marriages will be happier and more emotionally liberated if both parties have practiced these principles prior to engagement. We would do well to question this basic assumption. Surely those who go through youth trying to avoid emotional pain, trying to prevent the possibility of suffering, trying to protect their emotions, are not as a result suddenly going to be emotionally vulnerable and open as soon as they get married. If anything, they will be the ones who have developed the emotional hardness.

Imagine a young girl who is first learning to walk on her own two legs. The father notices and realizes that there might be falls, and the potential of physical pain, before she can finally walk without error. Suppose the father, wanting to prevent his girl from the possibility of this pain, comes and offers her a wheel chair for her to sit and be pushed around in until she is nine. At nine years old, he thinks, her mind will have developed a level of control and sophistication to enable her to learn to walk without the errors that invariably confront the toddler. Now if a father really did that, what would happen when the girl finally reached the day where he authorized her to walk? She would be a cripple since her legs, through continual neglect, would have lost the ability to function.

In a very similar way, a father who successfully disallows his daughter (or son) from experiencing natural human emotions until she is able to do so without the possibility of hurt will very likely have damaged her very ability to experience normal emotions.

I’m not a neurologist but I've read enough neurology to know that during a person's formative years the brain has a placidity which allows certain patterns to be established in the infrastructure of the brain. During these years the brain is like flexible putty. The older one gets, however, the more the brain gradually solidifies. This means that if one part of the brain has been deprived from growing normally, it is very difficult to go back and cut new grooves since the brain does not have the same neuro-plasticity. Now the brain controls the emotions, and an adult's ability to experience healthy emotions is contingent to a large degree on how his or her emotions were handled during the formative years. For example, if a baby or child senses parental disapproval every time they cry, they quickly learn to repress such feelings and expressions. As an adult such a person may find it difficult to express or even to feel spontaneous emotion since the brain has been trained to do the opposite.

Similarly, when it comes to romantic emotions, if an adolescent is influenced to greet the arrival of such emotions with suspicion, repression and guilt, they will likely find it difficult to experience these emotions properly when they are suddenly told it is legitimate. The positive side is that the Lord is able to heal and make whole, but this can be a torturesomly difficult process if one has years of opposite brain patterns to contend against.

The Young Person’s Point of View

It will be worthwhile now to consider the issue of emotions from a young person’s point of view. For nearly every young person, the intensity of emotions is perhaps the hardest thing to work through. The sensation that life is unbearably happy one minute and unbearably sad the next is a common experience. In retrospect we may forget how real and meaningful our feelings were to us back then, and we are left with little or no understanding and sympathy to offer our children.

The courtship pioneers have taken it one stage further to question whether this age of passion and intensity is really necessary, or whether it is a sort of appendage which lack of true perception, together with cultural pressures, make us subject to.

It must be realized that a broken heart of the sort that has a teenager sobbing into his or her pillow one day but heals into hope the next, is a basic part of a young person’s life. As adolescents we need the love, support and guidance of our parents, not the censor and subsequent guilt of being told we have done wrong or have been too weak. It is in learning that we grow, not in becoming so emotionally contrived that we become hard and unemotional.

Often the broken heart is a private affair - we secretly like a boy or girl but never tell anyone, least of all the person in question! - but our heart skips a beat when we pass them. Then that person leaves the neighborhood and our world comes crashing down. Or we 'fall in love' with a wonderful person in a film or book, and at the end of the story the beauty of it breaks our hearts, we hardly know why. Such are the experiences of most young people: crushes, fantasies, dreams and feelings which are very real to us at the time.

In time, however, such feelings fade and we grow to see things more objectively. But if, at the time, scorn or ridicule had been meted out to us in our vulnerability, we would in fact have closed up our heart, thoughts and feelings when we may actually need to share them with someone. Or if our parents had brought us up to feel there was something intrinsically wrong with these experiences, something they disapproved of, then we might have hardened ourselves emotionally and formed a crust around our heart out of desperation to be 'correct.' Others, unable to do this, may live in a perpetual guilt-ridden state, too ashamed to share their 'sinful feelings' with anyone.

If a young person's feelings are not seen in perspective by the adults who should be helping them through these years, namely their parents, then the normal emotional intensity has added to it the parents’ unrealistic notion of life. Things, which in time would die a natural death, are given an extended life of prolonged guilt. It is all very counterproductive.

The Trade-off

Parents who have this destructive mentality will not only prevent guilt-prone youths from falling into the 'sin' of having a crush on someone, or of admitting it if they do, but they will prevent that child from the natural healing of that broken heart. The parent who is trying to tie up their youth's emotions is not at the same time able to help that youth come to terms with those feelings, to face them, accept them, grow from them, and grow out of them.

I am not saying that having a broken heart is an inherently good thing because we can grow from it, or that we should try to get our hearts broken in order to learn lessons. Far from it! A boy who is learning to ride a bicycle will likely have a few falls to start with, and learn from the painful experience of falling how to properly manage the bicycle. It would be stupid, however, if the boy took this fact and fell off the bike on purpose in order to learn from it. The parent who says his teenagers mustn’t have individual friendships with members of the opposite sex because there is then the possibility of the emotional pain of a broken heart, would be like a parent who didn’t let his son learn to ride a bicycle because of the possibility of the physical pain of falling off.

I am saying what is true of any kind of suffering, that although it is not something that we should go out of our way to try to experience, neither does God want us going out of our way to try to prevent suffering.[20] Creating a plan for life that will safeguard us from pain, from our own emotions, and those of others, likewise does not help us grow. Nobody likes pain, nobody wants a relationship to end in tears, but if that does happen, does that automatically mean we were sinning? Does that mean we should make sure we protect our children from such an experience by attempting to exercise tight control over their emotions? Does it mean we should allow fear to turn us into something like a computer that automatically backs itself up at every point?

It is the job of a parent to help growth, not to dictate it, to help young people approach relationships with integrity and honor and to help them if things go wrong. It is the job of parents to help young people grow from their suffering and broken hearts, not to try to artificially create situations to prevent any possibility of broken hearts. The only way to prevent the possibility of a young person getting a broken heart is to prevent that child from ever feeling love, and that is the most tragic thing a parent could do to a child. It is not sensitive and caring when Lindvall talks about wanting to spare his children the suffering of a broken heart, for if you want a heart that cannot be broken, what you need is a heart that cannot love. C.S. Lewis puts this well.

I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness... We shall draw nearer to God, not be trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.[21]

When the New York Times did a front page feature on the courtship movement they quoted from a 'betrothed' man who said, "I can begin to emotionally connect because it’s safe." Safe? What in life is really safe? If these people are looking for an emotionally safe existence, they need to go a lot further to guard themselves. Hell is the only place where you are perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love, as C. S. Lewis brings out in the excellent passage I cited at the beginning of this essay.

With regard to the particular pain of a broken heart, if this must be avoided at all costs, why stop at a prohibition on relationships with the opposite sex? Why not also prohibit all friendships with members of the same sex since it is always possible that someone we have grown to love - perhaps a best friend that we have shared our heart with in a special way - may die, may change, or may do something that leaves us hurting?

After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center my wife was talking to a woman about it. The women mentioned that she had heard on the news that a boy had telephoned his mother from the airplane just before the crash to tell her that he loved her. My wife's friend said that she would not have been able to cope with that sort of thing if she was a mother. She has chosen not have children in order to avoid the potential pain. It's certainly true that if you're not prepared for the possibility of a broken heart, you shouldn't have children. After all, children may die, they may suffer, they may go through experiences that make the parents weep. If God were somehow against broken hearts, He surely would not have given parents the ability to have children.

In the end, if we really want the security of knowing our heart will not break, if we really want a life that is emotionally safe, we must carefully guard our heart from becoming attached to anyone - man, woman or animal.

If all that is being sought is some formula for a mistake-free, pain-free life, then the message being currently preached is that mistakes are sin, and pain is sin, and we must not allow either a place in our lives. This is not the gospel that produces a lightness and freedom and trust in God. Instead this places such a huge burden of responsibility on a person to get every detail right one hundred percent of the time that to fail is weakness, and weakness is despised. The emphasis is placed on our control, not God's. The emphasis is that the fewer mistakes you make the more pleasing you are to God. And this brings us full circle, for isn't the whole courtship methodology, as exposed in Best Friends for Life, the result of this wrong idea: that achievement equals acceptability? That we are loved for what we are rather than who we are? If we feel that that is the way God 'loves' us, then we will never understand true love in our human relationships either. The real problem with the teachers we have been reviewing is not primarily a misunderstanding about relationships, but a misunderstanding about the very character of God.

The Shoe is on the Other Foot

It is a paradox worth considering that although these apparent solutions to 'broken heart syndrome' are meant to reduce or eliminate emotional pain, in practice we often find the exact reverse operating. When young people do 'slip' and express themselves romantically, the persecution and 'discipline' that is often levied upon them is certainly a far greater source of broken hearts than any hypothesized effects that pre-engagement romance is supposed to have in future marriage. To illustrate this I’d like to share what happened in one church that was progressively taken over by followers of Gothard and Lindvall.

The sad incident I am about to relate concerns a young man (whom I will call Mark) whose parents were hard-core Gothardites, and a young women (whom I will call Rachel) whose parents were not so legalistic but still had strict standards when it came to relationships. Events transpired whereby Mark and Rachel developed a relationship. They never went further than to hold hands on one occasion for a few minutes. However, when Mark’s parents found out that they had held hands, they were horrified and said that they had both committed spiritual adultery against their future spouses. The parents of Mark decided to follow the advice for such situations, namely to make sure that all ties between the two were completely severed. Never again would their son be allowed to speak to Rachel. I do not mean that Mark was not allowed to speak to Rachel for a period of time; I mean that Mark was permanently banned from ever having anything to do with Rachel for the rest of his life! Rachel’s parents were horrified, especially since she was being treated like an adulterous.

Think of this and all the other broken hearts that this teaching has caused, together with the lives and relationships it has ruined. Consider then that this teaching is being propagated on the grounds that it will reduce emotional pain! Surely that is the ultimate self-deception.

Deep Regrets in Marriage?

More than ever before, young people require guidance and understanding to develop a high value for love and marriage. A correct framework for understanding relationships will help young people not to pursue relationships in the light of the last two approaches. However, it needs to be understood that when there has been hurt in a broken relationship and when further relationships are sullied with doubt and fear as a consequence, that is never something that a true love relationship within marriage cannot heal. Each is able to find healing from past mistakes through the love and forgiveness of the Lord.

I want to especially emphasize this fact as there is a great deal of fear being generated within young people today by teachers who are saying that romantic relationships engaged in before marriage with anyone other than one’s future spouse will rob from one’s marriage.

One lady recently wrote to me concerned about a teen-age girl she knows whose parents follow Jonathan Lindvall’s teachings. This lady told me how fearful her young friend has become of experiencing any romantic emotions that are not consummated in marriage. Even the possibility of this happening provoked alarming distress in this girl who replied, “I don't want to even know about someone being interested in me until we are betrothed!"

This is not one isolated incident. Growing numbers of young people are becoming so fearful of ‘unauthorized emotions’. One lady wrote that she had been in bondage and fear over this for years. When she went on her first ‘coffee-date’ she feared that she would be damaging her future marriage by going out with someone who might not become her husband. Later she wrote, “I am so happy to be released from this groundless fear.”

Why is there such extreme fear? The answer is because these people have been absolutely convinced that unalterable consequences will follow the existence of such emotions. What are such consequences? Thompson says that a woman who has had former boyfriends will “have only a fragment of her heart left to give” to her husband. In Joshua Harris’ first book I Kissed Dating Goodbye he refers to a bride's nightmare in which her groom stands at the alter, holding hands with the phantoms of all his previous girlfriends.

Lindvall never misses a chance to share that because he and his wife experienced romantic relationships before marrying each other, it has "hindered our emotional unity."[22] We have already seen that one of Lindvall's central arguments for betrothal is the need he feels to spare his own children the deep regrets that he and his wife bear as a result of each other's former boyfriends and girlfriends. Writing of his children, Lindvall says "to the degree that they allow me to protect them from the emotional scars my wife and I bear, they will be spared the regrets we suffer."[23]I get the impression that all Lindvall's teaching on this subject springs out of this personal aspect.

Obviously I cannot argue against Lindvall's own experience, nor would I want to, though I cannot relate to it personally. Throughout my adolescence I had numerous crushes on all sorts of girls, and yet my wife does not feel jealous because she knows that she is the fulfillment of all my earlier romantic dreams and aspirations. I feel the same way about her. If, however, I had truly and intimately loved another woman before marrying my wife (a 'knitting of heart', as Lindvall describes his regrettable experience with a former girlfriend), then it would be understandable that my wife might feel jealous. But where love is true, unconditional, strong and exclusive in marriage, it will eventually swallow up any feelings of jealousy over past relationships through the solid reassurance it provides.

Could it be that the reason Lindvall and his wife are still so jealous of each other's past girlfriends and boyfriends is because, as Lindvall has freely admitted, "my Marriage to Connie...is not based on love"?[24] Perhaps if Lindvall came to understand the true meaning of love in marriage he would be in a position to better understand what should happen before marriage. Where it is possible to have past relationships permanently harm a present marriage, the problem is within the marriage itself. While it is only natural for a man to want to be the only man his wife has ever fallen in love with, and visa versa, we live in a fallen world and this will usually not be the case. Does this mean that the marriage will automatically suffer, that the husband and wife will not be able to love each other as much as they otherwise might have been able, that they will be less able to discover God's best, that their relationship will be less enriching, less fulfilling? Absolutely not! Now there are certainly going to be insecurities in just about every marriage and each will need to have their partner's love reassured. Insecurities are a result of many things from the thought of past relationships (which can especially be a problem when one or both of the parties has been married before) to one's inability to believe oneself lovable because of abuse as a child. In each case, these are things that a man and wife can work through together and be drawn closer as a result, not by having a fatalistic attitude which says, "this has happened in my past, therefore my marriage is necessarily going to be less good than it otherwise could have been." Rather, the husband and wife should be seeking ways to let their love cover over and heal all the regrets of the past.

The Search for Safety

No true relationship is safe, whether it be a love relationship or just a relationship of friends. That is why the philosophy of safeguarding ourselves against emotional hurt leads to the death of relationships. Indeed, if the principle which courtship and betrothal is based be consistently applied to its full extension, then all forms of relationships must be denied us, for that principle is that the possibility of emotional pain must be removed whatever the cost.

At the opening of this essay I quoted C. S. Lewis on the inherent risk of all love. I was very moved the other day when a young man named Paul wrote to me about the effect that quote had in changing his life. Let me share Paul’s experience as he recorded it.

In the name of safety, I myself have wrapped my heart carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoided entanglements, and locked it up. It has not been broken. But it has begun to change. It has started to become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. Thankfully, I don't think I've reached that point, and I am confident that God can undo the damage I have done.

What am I talking about exactly? When I was about 13, I was introduced to the teachings of a man named Jonathan Lindvall. I listened to his tapes and attended one of his seminars. One of the primary beliefs I accepted from his teaching was that I should avoid and suppress romantic emotions before I make a lifelong commitment with my future wife. Notice that the idea was not that romantic emotions should be understood and controlled, but rather avoided and suppressed….

Though it seems to make sense at first, especially to the American "safety and security" mindset, it is really a lie. And I recognized the lie when I read Lewis's words: "If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one...The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation." Tragedy, pain, brokenness, can all result from giving your heart to someone that isn't fully committed to you. But THAT'S OK! "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."

… I realized last night that avoiding or suppressing my emotions is never a good idea, because they are an integral part of why God made me…. What has changed is that the process by which I choose my wife will no longer be devoid of emotion. It will be full of emotion, and risks will be taken for the sake of love. However the change of my mind extends beyond my view of pre-marital romance, into my view of love in general.

…there is the concern that if a couple's relationship is based on emotions, then when the emotions are lost, the relationship will be abandoned. But it is a false dichotomy to say that a relationship is either based on commitment or emotions. Why can't it be both? Aren't married people supposed to cultivate and share deep emotions for one another? And can they not, at the same time, be fully committed to one another? Sure there is the danger that emotions will fade and the relationship will lose its vitality. But that doesn't mean we should abandon emotions entirely! The answer to infidelity is not subtracting emotion, but rather adding commitment to the emotion.

Though I've still got a long way to go, I think that God has started unlocking my heart, and I trust that He will redeem the years I've spent trying to keep it intact. I pray that God would help me to "throw away all defensive armor" and that He would make me willing to have my heart broken. May my love be dangerously passionate!

The process Paul is going through of tearing down the walls of protection erected around his heart, is not unique to himself. It is a process we all have go through…continually. It is a process that represents the very essence of love itself, for love that is unwilling to wade beyond the shores of safety is not love at all but self-love.

I am reminded of Christ’s parable of the talents. Recall that the man who was given one talent feared lest he lose it. While the other servants were out trading with their capital and seeing it increase, the fearful servant dug a hole and buried the talent in the ground. It was his fear of losing it that prevented him from using it. As a friend of mine has recently observed, fear of failure is the greatest motivation to failure that ever existed. Every trade involves a risk. It is only by overcoming our fears and risking something of ourselves that we ultimately get anywhere.

We have seen the way these teachers have attempted to create a pain-free world, where one never gets heart-broken and every element of risk and unpredictability is systematically eliminated from the equation of human relationships. In this way it is a world where ostensibly you have nothing to fear, yet the paradox remains that it is fear that drives people to submit to such regimes in the first place. As with the man who had one talent, something is buried in the ground. In this case, however, what is buried in the ground is not money…it is our own hearts.

C. S. Lewis himself confessed to struggle with this very issue. In The Four Loves, Lewis says that in one sense it seems like perfect advice not to give your heart to anyone but God.

“Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of. And there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I do to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering.”

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liability. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less.”[25]

So what happens when one of these ‘safe’ relationships does lead to marriage? Presumably it is imagined that the resulting marriage will be an emotionally safe frontier. Marriage can be emotionally safe, but only in the same way that pre-marital relationships and life itself can be made emotionally safe. Remain in the safety of the shallows and do not allow yourself to be discovered and known by yourself and the other in all your nakedness, vulnerability and weakness. Harden up when that little voice says, “Watch out, you might get hurt.” Such a marriage may be free from pain, it is true, but it will also be free from joy, intimacy and glory.

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