Valentine is Coming, Where’s your Partner?

Valentine is coming, where’s your Partner? This viral internet skit has grown to become a yearly valentines anthem but for most church folks, there’s a louder anthem — 1 Corinthians 13!

The reading of 1st Corinthians 13 thrives when Valentine Week arrives. Cobwebs get pulled off and dust is blown off the pages of that chapter, as it’s declared the anthem of the month — “Love is patient, love is kind…” and so on.

Love is so much an integral part of life for us to treat it like a once-a-year birthday celebration but I’m not here to tell you how to or how not to celebrate your valentine. The truth is, I have made some plans for the Valentine season myself (as a once-a-year celebration) so I’m just as guilty.

Recently, though, I’ve been reflecting on our obsession with the concept of love and how it’s being depicted, especially on TV: Boy meets girl, they like each other, she goes into the “he loves me, he loves me not” mode, he buys her chocolates and flowers, they fall madly in love and elope to a small, charming town to love happily ever.

Cue sigh.

Wake up! That was a dream made in Hollywood.

There’s more to love than roses and chocolates, (even though these are nice).

But there’s more to love and as cliche as it sounds, we will have to go back to our beloved passage to learn and know the truth about love.

1 Corinthians 13: 4-8

Love is large and incredibly patient. Love is gentle and consistently kind to all. It refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else. Love does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance. Love does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek its own honour. Love is not easily irritated or quick to take offense. Love joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong. Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others. Love never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up.

This popular chapter exposes love for what it is: kind, patient, selfless, not boastful, and full of compassion and empathy. If we paid more attention to these expressions of love, we’d be likely to have a lot less crises in our world and the fuss around this season might not be heavy with pressure.

But I get it. The pressures on social media can be really heavy, everyone is coupled up, there’s a fight to be the ‘perfect couple’ and there you are, single and alone. In fact, it can get so intense that one could easily skip a lot of red flags and bypass the cues presented in 1 Corinthians 13 just not to be alone or feel left out and to be honest, I can’t blame anyone.

No one wants to be alone which is the feeling most people get in seasons like this. But the truth is that some of us, maybe even you reading this, will be left behind or left out of the ‘love boat’ and it’s okay.

You need to know that there is nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing wrong with being alone (sometimes).

You’re single or alone on Valentine’s Day? So what?

There is more in store for you than the flighty sort of companionship just for the sake of not missing out. When it is your time, you will be properly coupled up, but in the mean time, there’s life to be living!

Walking in love (not just romantic love) requires focus and intention, and it begins with you in your friendships, your relationship with your family, and your colleagues.

Preparing yourself for a partner starts with the intentionality of self-grooming. You have to want to be the best you there is. It might sound counter-intuitive but you have to do this for yourself first and then for the world. This is part of our worship to the Father.

Take your everyday, ordinary life — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life — and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. — Romans 12: 1–2

When your everyday life is an offering to the Father, carefully and deliberately perfumed with kindness, patience, selflessness, humility, compassion, and empathy, you find much joy in living and loving, whether or not there is a romantic partner present.

You may not have a bouquet of flowers on your doorstep this weekend, but you have a life which is a beautiful garden in the tender hands of a loving Gardener.

God has made you whole and complete and you do not become incomplete because you do not have a partner on Valentine’s Day!

And even if you’re coupled up, there is still more in store for you as separate individuals and then as a couple.

Take out time this Valentine to focus on what really matters. As you smell the roses and munch on the candy bars, remember that there is more the love than one kind of love, the type displayed on your TV scenes. Love is about friendship, kindness, patience…

Focus on that and purposefully work on your heart this season and beyond.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you — Single, Coupled or Somewhere in-between. You are loved.

Written by Makuochi Okafor, a Content Strategist, Living in Lagos, Nigeria.