What's Love Got to Do with It?

The song, "What's Love Got to Do with It?" was made famous by singer Tina Turner.

She sang,

You must understand, though the touch of your hand

Makes my pulse react

That it's only the thrill of boy meeting girl

Opposites attract

It's physical

Only logical

You must try to ignore that it means more than that

Oh-oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it?

What's love but a second-hand emotion?

What's love got to do, got to do with it?

Who needs a heart (when a heart can be broken?)

Tina seems to be telling her audience that it is not worth breaking your heart to connect love -- what she called a second-hand emotion -- to sexual attraction. Is it possible to separate the two?  What happens when we do?  Is love really just an emotion? 

In his book, the Four Loves, C.S. Lewis gives us a profound, in-depth study of the many facets of love.  He makes a distinction between affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Love does have an emotional component along with many others. Scripture teaches that humans are made in the image of a God who is capable of deep emotion. Jesus Christ displayed God's highest intention for human emotion, including sadness, anger, grief, and love. 

In my early journey as a Christ-follower, I often heard the phrase, "Love is not a feeling, it is an act of the will." In truth, love involves much more than a single feeling or a sheer act of the will.  Like a superbly cut diamond, God's love, like His very nature, is displayed in a myriad of facets including emotions and intentions of the heart, thoughts and beliefs of the mind, and the will to behave in ways that are nourishing and life-giving. This includes the capacity to feel the pain and pleasure of our bodies and sensitivity to sexual sensations.

Together, being fully human means embracing, accepting, and integrating our heavenly Father's gift of this multi-faceted human heart, mind, soul, and body which we have been given for joy and the glory of God. God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, experienced God's love as a Son, was tempted in every conceivable way to sin, yet consistently demonstrated the emotions, thoughts, intentions, and behaviors that were consistent with the whole and expansive love of God. There is a good reason that Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.  This is a shalom love.

It is understandable that our culture fears the instability of fickle emotions. We often see the damage that results from making decisions impulsively and solely on the basis of feelings. But there is also a great deal of damage that results from dismissing emotion as unspiritual or without merit and meaning.  We are to be informed by our emotions without being controlled by them. Negative emotions are like a vital alarm system that alerts us to possible threats. Positive emotions are like a spring of water bubbling up to alert us to a potential source of life-giving nourishment and refreshment. 

We were not created to separate our emotions from the rest of our being. Both men and women, like Tina Turner, have attempted to avoid the pain of a broken heart by attempting to enjoy sexual pleasure without an emotional investment. Although this may initially seem quite attractive, women and men who have years of experience detaching their sexuality from the rest of their personhood often complain of finding it difficult to risk the kind of vulnerability and trust that cultivates genuine, whole-person intimacy. Research on the topic of sexual addiction continues to reveal the bonding and attachment deficits of those who have learned to separate emotional vulnerability from sexual vulnerability. Those of us who develop the capacity to avoid one kind of broken heart discover that we must repair another kind of broken heart if we are to enjoy the ecstatic enjoyment of genuine intimacy as whole persons. Emotions are an important part of our internal landscape and shape our human connectedness whether feelings of warmth and closeness or a sense of cold and distant detachment. 

What’s love got to do with it? “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.  The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love…There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear…”

– I John 4:7-8; 18a