It is ironic how similar very different perspectives can be about the question of dating. This morning I watched the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. It had been a quirky movie about a guy who has to defeat seven evil exes in order to win the girl of his dreams (who is actually a pretty decent young woman). He’s not a very appealing person himself, though, nor a very honorable one, but he grows up a lot. At any rate, I was intrigued in looking at the film that it makes very similar points (albeit in a vastly more crude way) to that of the vastly more refined I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

A key aspect of both the movie and the book, despite their many differences in tone, is their commentary on the excess baggage we tend to carry around in this world due to our relationship history. Now, though these relationships may often be romantic, they don’t need to be. We carry around lots of relationship baggage from all our relationships–our families, neighbors, friends (and frenemies), as well as relationships. But for many people romantic relationships hurt the most because that’s when we let people get the furthest inside.

Why do relationships leave so much baggage? A large part of it stems from the fact that we don’t often communicate very well what offends us and so we let things build up for far too long, and because we aren’t very good at obeying the law of love. Because we are sinners we hurt each other a lot, and every sin tears into relationships. We make people into idols and put them on pedestals and when they show themselves as fallible human beings we are deeply hurt, having expected perfection from fallible human beings. And the same is true for us–we are hurt by betrayals and dashed expectations and disappointments, and when are feelings are hurt we don’t tend to be rational or reflect on the fact that we too have a share of the blame. We just create villain stories and turn complicated people into villains.

Truth be told, I have lived a fairly hard life in many respects, and I have met no villains. I have met a lot of people who have done great harm and inflicted great suffering, but none of them were villains. We not that simple. We do evil things for good motives, good things for bad motives, and most things for mixed motives we generally do not examine or understand about ourselves, much less others. We judge ourselves for our good intents and judge others by their bad results. We demand too little of ourselves and expect too much from others. How can we not end up with lots of excess baggage, a fair amount of it our own fault, given the way that we live our lives.

And that’s not even getting into the hurt we give ourselves through our promiscuity and the way in which we throw away our innocence and damage our hearts and bodies far too easily in this age. We ought to be more careful with relationships–we are playing with dangerous materials when we make friendships and relationships. I don’t think we take such matters seriously enough, and then we try to justify ourselves when things go badly to make it appear as if the other person is to blame when there is usually some sort of shared blame in some way. We seem to act as if any admission of fault on our side would make it impossible to convict the other party of their many sins, but in reality we merely show ourselves to be unjust judges when we point fingers at others and whitewash ourselves.

In many ways, life is like an airlines. It tends to punish and charge people in happiness and success if they lug around their excess baggage all the time. There isn’t room to fit it in planes or buses or cars or apartments. We just drag it along with us wherever we go. It’s rather sad, really. It’s a shame we don’t just do some spring cleaning and try to get rid of some of the baggage, especially if we don’t want it anymore. But we can only get rid of it by examining it and wrestling with it. Sometimes that’s like wrestling with alligators, but we have to determine what we want in life–happiness or some pale imitation of justice.