“I really like him. What do I do now?”
I have a confession to make: back in my dark adolescent past, I used to have a subscription to Dolly magazine. My friends and I would talk about the articles on love and relationships, gag over Dolly Doctor, and try the quizzes on each other in the schoolyard. The subscription only lasted for a year; after that, I think I grew out of it.
But recently, when I was looking at some women's magazines for a project I'm working on, I noticed that in magazines aimed at the demographic between teens and mums, although most of the content was essentially the same, the articles on love and relationships were curiously absent. Instead, there was an awful lot of material on sex, e.g. “Become a Sex Rebel: 67 lusty moves he'll crave 24-7”; “News Flash: Sex Gets Better With Age” and “Sex Tips from Gay Men”.
Perhaps people have got couplehood sorted and they no longer need advice on how to stay together. Perhaps meeting someone and going out with him or her isn't as complicated as it was when I was 16. Or maybe Dolly, Cleo and Cosmopolitan (to name but a few) have just shifted with the times, recognizing that people have become more like consumers than contributers—they use others purely for their own pleasure and discard them without qualm when they're done. They're not interested in what makes a good relationship work because they're not after good relationships, just gratifying ones.
Okay, I'm over-generalising. But I wonder whether there's a golden opportunity here for Christians to fill the gap and counsel not just the kids in our youth groups, but some of those poor confused teens, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings and above. After all, we have a distinct advantage: we understand God's plans and purposes for human relationships, and how and why they work. Would it be helpful, I wonder, to have some sort of online site with articles like “Crush or Crushed? I really like him but what if he doesn't like me?”, “How Far is Too Far?” and “The Real Love Rules (and meet the guy who made them)” written by Christians?