Though it didn’t last long, I liked the television show Ed. Thomas Cavanagh played a contract lawyer who, after an unexpected divorce and losing his job, returned to Stuckeyville, the small town where he grew up. Ed reconnects with Carol, the girl he adored but never got in high school. Though the show revolved around Ed’s sometimes comical court cases, the bulk of the dramatic tension came from the question of whether or not he would be able to win Carol’s heart.

The “will they/won’t they” tension is not new. In fact it is overplayed and has been the heart of shows including Cheers, Moonlighting, The Office and others. “Will they or won’t they get together” is actually the plot of nearly every “romantic comedy” made. It works best when characters have been developed enough to allow the audience to care (which is rare) and it is an obvious tool to create emotional involvement with characters that otherwise might not exist and it is a tool to weave together many other story lines. But there’s something interesting to Hollywood’s use of this device: nearly every time (at least in the television series version of the tool. Romantic Comedy movies tend to resolve happily), when the couple gets together, the show ends. Consider the aforementioned Ed and Moonlighting.

This tendency reveals at least a couple of different things. First, that Hollywood, for the most part, lacks any real creativity. The fact that such trite tools have become trite is because Hollywood often uses cheap gimmicks in the place of true character development or plot structure. It’s much easier to take a shortcut. It seems to me that this is somewhat tied to our consumer mentality. Most television shows are not about art or creativity but about making money. An artistic decision will often be squashed in the face of money. Many networks are interested in what will attract the most viewers, which is not necessarily the same thing as real creativity. Hence the tendency to resort to “tried and true” formulas rather than plow new ground.

But another, more important thing that I think the tendency of “will they/won’t they” resulting in cancelled shows when they do is just how boring our culture things healthy relationships truly are. Some might want to call our infatuation with the “will they/won’t they” plotline an infatuation with romance. However, if this is the case, then it is an elevation of romance over commitment and feelings over true love. The fact that most of the shows built around this premise fade away once the characters do get together is proof that healthy relationships simply aren’t all that interesting to much of our culture.

As a pastor, one of the privileges I have been given is performing weddings. This includes premarital counseling. It’s interesting to watch as some couples’ conceptions about and experience of love actually change. There’s nothing wrong with romance or the “warm fuzzy” feelings we get at the beginning of a relationship. In fact, those are great things, but our world’s conception of love is about what we can get and we expect the other person to continue creating those warm fuzzy feelings in us. When they don’t, we’re taught to look for the next relationship that will. However, biblical love is not about what we can get but about what we can give (Philippians 2:3, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, etc.).

Biblical love is a choice to push through the difficult times. Biblical love goes beyond emotions to the how and why of everday living, when the person has morning breath or when you feel slighted because they got up from the breakfast table without asking how you slept (these are not illustrations from my own life!). But Hollywood is not interested in these things and therefore, is not interested in “healthy” relationships.

While tension makes for entertaining television, biblical love forces us to push through those tensions without letting the sun go down on our anger (Ephesians 4:26). One of the worrisome things is that many Christians have never been truly challenged to think about the difference between the worldly and biblical conceptions of love. The result is that the divorce rate for professing Christians is no different, and in fact (see here among other sources), may be higher than the surrounding culture (certainly there are other factors here but this is at least part of the problem). Why should the world understand the excitement of a healthy, biblical marriage when many professing Christians still don’t?

It’s interesting that our culture would find one of God’s most gracious gifts “boring.” Marriage is God’s idea, not man’s. It was God, not man who delcared that it was not good for the man to be alone and it was God, not man who remedied the situation (Genesis 2:18-25). Anyone who thinks Song of Solomon is boring clearly hasn’t read the book! The problem, as I’ve alluded to, does not seem to be that the world doesn’t understand, we shouldn’t expect them to. Rather, the problem is that far too many professing Christians don’t understand marriage (truth be told, on a much more troubling level, many probably don’t understand salvation).

The answer, it seems to me, is not to petition Congress or create a public awareness campaign against Hollywood, or even to boycott, but rather, to first convince Christians to live like Christians and then convince them of the truly glorious realities of God’s gift of marriage. Instead of thinking how exciting the Hollywood relationships appear, more Christians need to feel how far these portrayals seriously miss the mark. This begins with local churches taking marriage seriously. We need to be serious not just about teaching the Bible but about living the Bible. I worry that our infatuation with failed romance is actually the sign of a failed conscience.

• Read Sacred Marriage by Gary L. Thomas
• Read Reforming Marriage by Douglas Wilson
• Read The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? by Ronald J. Sider