Loveology

“Love is at the forefront of the experience of what it means to be human. We can choose to try to figure it out on our own, or we can choose to see how the designer of love intended us to experience all this. Loveology guides us straight into the heart of God, who created this wonderous, powerful experience of love, romance, sex, marriage, masculinity, and femininity.”

Dan Kimball

“My husband and I heard “loveology” at the beginning of our relationship, and it changed our entire view on love and dating. It exposed and shattered all the “Hollywood movie” lies that were embedded in our minds and replaced them with God’s original design. Following the Loveology principles gave our relationship a sense of direction, saved us from making a lot of painful mistakes many couples make, and answered a ton of questions.”

Naomi and Isaiah

I didn’t grow up in church, which means my view of relationships was partly formed by culture and partly by my family background. I grew up with two parents who loved each other deeply. My Mom and Dad did an excellent job at showing me what a healthy marriage looks like as I was growing up. My parents are committed to each other and love each other very well. For me, the negative influences came through culture, not from my family.

I watched a lot of Hollywood movies as a teenager which strongly influenced my view of love and marriage. When you consume a lot of TV Shows and movies as a teenager the media becomes much more than entertainment. The TV Shows and movies painted a picture of what love, sex and romance was supposed to look like. I specifically remember watching the movie American Pie at age 14 and thinking to myself “I need to fit myself into that type of lifestyle, that’s how it’s done.” Most of the time we aren’t conscious of how much we are influenced by the media, but psychological research shows that we are strongly influenced by what we watch and consume.

We are all strongly affected by our parents’ relationship and pop culture media, another influencer is porn. I was 10 years old the first time my friends and I watched a porn movie on VHS. You can imagine how much a young person’s view of sexuality is influenced when you start watching porn long before you even hit puberty. I don’t want my own kids and future generations to grow up the way I did, exposed to the same destructive lies and distorted views of sex, romance, love and marriage that formed me.

I got married at 26 and at that point I had around 16 years of negative baggage that I brought into my marriage. The more baggage you bring into your marriage the harder you will need to work to overcome those negative past experiences that have formed you. It’s totally possible to overcome your past, but it takes a lot of hard work. I had multiple, short failed relationships before meeting my husband, and he had a few long-term failed relationships before meeting me. When we met and fell madly in love we didn’t want anything to ruin the love we had found. We decided to educate ourselves about love and marriage because “doing things our own way” had led us both to have failed relationships. The more we learned about God’s beautiful design for love, romance, marriage and sex the more we realized why our own ways had not worked. Let me just say that God’s view of sex, romance and love is very different from what porn, Hollywood movies and culture at large are teaching us.

As a society you could say that we are “bad at love”. Statistics show us that around 50% of marriages fail in our modern society. Second and third marriages have even higher chances of failure. Research also shows that couples who live together before they get married have higher chance of divorce than those who move in together after they get married. Couples who lived together before marriage see a 33% higher rate of divorce than those who waited to live together until after they were married. Most of us are fully aware of these depressing statistics, but then there’s another type of shocking statistic. There’s one group of people where research shows that less than 1% of them end up divorced. Man, I want to be a part of that group!!

Couples who pray together on a regular basis have less than 1% chance of divorce. In other words, not couples who attend church a few times a year, but couples who have an active, thriving relationship with God and who seek God together. Those statistics alone is enough to motivate me to prioritize taking time to pray together with my husband daily. In a society where divorce is very common it’s obvious that “doing whatever you feel like” will not lead to a healthy, thriving marriage. My relationship with my husband is far too important for me to risk messing it up. I want to continue to learn more about God’s beautiful plan for marriage every year, and through that get better at loving my husband every day.