The Politics of Love

Remember Myspace? Well, I never understood the concept of 'Top Friends'. You want to know the truth? I have never even really understood the concept of 'best friends'. I find myself using the term, but mostly to clarify the terms of our relationship when discussing it with other people. I often feel the need to distinguish that the nature of our friendship is significantly more deep than a mere acquaintance, or even a casual friendship. That is why you may hear me refer to multiple people as my 'best friend'... yet I almost never refer to them that way in their presence.

So, Myspace forced us to identify the eight people in our lives that were somehow superior to the rest. I am not sure what purpose this served except to create this giant popularity contest. I guess it fits within our culture which feels the need to rank things at every opportunity. I think this is epitomized in the show that used to be (and may still be, I don't have cable, so I don't know)on E! network, fittingly entitled "Rank". Every episode featured a new list of people, categorized and neatly labeled in ascending order.

Why?

Some might call me extreme, but I think that our competitive nature is evidence of our struggle between our nature of insecurity and our nature of pride. It seems everyone has a little of both. I am both incredibly uncertain of my own value, and yet incredibly caught up in myself and my own worth.

This leads to a lot of issues in our lives. We need to feel validated, so we seek fulfillment from other people. We approach relationships as methods of solving our own problems, or our way of receiving the love we are craving. We compete to prove that we are valuable, we devalue others by criticism and insult.

People laugh when I use this example... but I grew up making fun of Baptists at every turn. It was petty jokes... but if I really examine my motives and am honest than myself, I did it because I wanted to feel superior to them in some small way. I needed to feel that even something as unimportant as the denomination I was affiliated with, made me slightly more valuable than the rest of the population.

At this point you may be wondering, why would anyone consider this opinion extreme? Well, the reason is that I see evidence of this in every form of competition. By that I mean.... sports, spelling bees, etc. Why do we need to compete? Why do we watch others compete? Why do we need to identify with a team? Why do we need our team to win? Well, I fundamentally think that these things are evidence of our state as humans seeking love and value in a world full of things that can't give it to us.

We all want to be loved. It's true. We all want to win at board games, we all want out teams to do well, we all want to be good at what we do, we all want to be right, we all want to be on people's 'top friends'... we all want to be worthy of others love and affection. Why?

We were designed that way. We were designed to be loved, to be constantly validated and fulfilled by a perfect, loving God.
But, Adam screwed it up and created this division. God never stopped loving us, but we have been separated in such a way that we aren't constantly aware of it.

So, what do we do? We seek love from those around us... we try and make ourselves more valuable by being good at things, by being funny or attractive... but it doesn't stop there, we need to be the VERY best, the MOST funny, and the MOST attractive. Because we NEED to be loved. The problem is other people are in need of love to, and not really capable of giving it unconditionally. So, we are constantly disappointed.

Top friends... who ever thought that ranking the people in your life was a good idea? How can you quantify relationships like that? And, how did it feel to be excluded, or lower on the totem pole than you thought? And really, what the heck does it matter!? Just because someone may have put 3 people ahead of you doesn't make the relationship you have with that person any less meaningful! It doesn't change a darn thing... all it does is make you aware of something, that I would argue... you were not meant to even consider, much less be aware of.