Column entry, “Lovebird Elegy,” by Chase Mitchell

Column: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story

December entry: “Lovebird Elegy”

Column Description: Image to Image: Musings on Faith, Media, and Story is a monthly column that illuminates old and new ideas about media ecology from a Christian perspective. Dr. Mitchell will explore what it means to bear God’s image and Christian witness in a mediated world, with a particular focus on the relationships between theology, media, and orthopraxy across different Christian traditions.

By Chase Mitchell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, East Tennessee State University

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Lovebird Elegy

We’re coming up on Valentine’s Day. I know from the pink and red felt hearts strung across the pharmacy counter.

Like most popular American holidays, Valentine’s Day traces its roots to the Christian Faith. But unlike Christmas and Easter, V-Day (much like St. Patrick’s Day) has been subsumed by secular culture such that its religious connotations are lost.

While Saint Valentine was associated with romantic love, his Day has become a byword for superficiality. Romantic love (eros) is a good and beautiful thing, a gift of God, but when it is immanentized—detached from supernatural, triune, self-giving love (agape)—it becomes unsustainable. In other words, when romance becomes the thing where we locate transcendence, it disappoints. Our significant others, no matter how beautiful, intelligent, or charming, are simply not equipped to romance us always and forever. Nor are we.

Actually, I think we realized a long time ago that mere romance cannot fulfill us, at least not in the existential sense. Sure, we still go through the motions in February and pay dutiful (chocolate and floral) homage to the patron saint of romance, that antique muse. But we’ve moved on, honey. We’ve fallen in love with ourselves.

Nevermind that to “love oneself” is an oxymoron. Tell that to our culture makers, though. The chorus of Miley Cyrus’s song “Flowers” (2023) confidently proclaims:

I can buy myself flowers

Write my name in the sand

Talk to myself for hours

Say things you don’t understand

I can take myself dancing

And I can hold my own hand

Yeah, I can love me better than you can

Another popstar, Taylor Swift, has become a global sensation by recapitulating the same themes—eros, breakup, reinvention—across the “eras” that span her career. You would think that, by now, she’d have figured out that romance qua romance is recursive. Profitable, to be sure, but dull. Yet she blazes on, valorizing individual “empowerment” and “freedom” at the expense of agape, monogamy, and fidelity.

These and other cultural artifacts reveal a trend. In the decline of sentimental romanticism there has been a rise in cynicism. “Love” is framed more and more in self-referential terms. Only I can satisfy the deepest longings of my heart.

Just as our secular narratives are becoming more self-referential, so too are our media technologies increasingly self-serving. Social media algorithms provide us with a never-ending stream of curated content that caters to our likes and dislikes; it also gives us a platform to craft and share our ideal self with the world. Streaming media, too—whether video or music—facilitate me-centered experiences.

And now, with generative AI, instead of suffering another person in real and sometimes difficult conversation, I can “converse” with ChatGPT, the partner who only speaks when spoken to, knows everything, and only talks about what I’m interested in. If you’ve seen the Joachim Phoenix movie Her (2013), I don’t think we’re far off from that bizarre scenario becoming a reality.

But what Christians know (or should remember) is that true romance lies in self-gift, not in self-indulgence. For eros to flourish through life’s lulls, disappointments, and pains, we must embody agape. And that kind of love requires, at times, sacrificing our whims, our time, and our energies in ways that mere eros does not.

Agape needs to be vulnerable. Recently, in the car on the way to see a friend, my wife said she’d discovered a new song. We listened to it—“Sun” by Derik Fein (2024)—and it’s an ode to self-preservation.

I used to fly

When I was a child

Never thought I’d

Fall out the sky

Before I knew the world was a stage

And all I loved was destined to break

The more I try leaving my cage

It doesn’t feel safe

A little bit of sun

Is what I need

A little bit of air

So I can breathe

I just need a distraction

From all of the madness

It’s all that I’m asking

I just want a little sun

Oh, I just want some sun

We come from the stars

But we got it wrong

You get what you are

And not what you want

Before I knew the world was a stage

And all I loved was destined to break

The more I try leaving my cage

It doesn’t feel safe

A little bit of sun

Is what I need

A little bit of air

So I can breathe

I just need a distraction

From all of the madness

It’s all that I’m asking

I just want a little sun

I just want a little sun

Oh, I just want some sun

The most telling lyric is You get what you are / And not what you want. This is a theological claim. And it’s wrong. It says that love is self-referential, not relational. To love someone is to give yourself to them, even when it’s not self-satisfying (and even when it hurts).

Because most romantic relationships begin with physical attraction, we assume that beauty precedes love. Hence the widespread belief in “love at first sight.” You are beautiful, and thus I love you. But true beauty—and indeed, lasting eros—is made manifest in the self-giving act of monogamy. In loving a person, your heart is continually reawakened to their beauty.

True romance sings: You get what you want (the beloved’s good) / And not what you are (a fickle sinner) / He’s all that you need (Christ who amplifies your beloved’s beauty as you share one another in self-gift). Somebody write that song.