Relationships & Love

Most people who land on a page in this cluster are not asking academic questions about love and relationships. They are inside one — a marriage, a friendship, a family system, a wound that has not healed, a question about who they are. The Christian tradition has a lot to say about love, and a fair amount of it is different from what people assume.

These pages take the questions seriously. You do not have to be religious to read them. Where a term comes up, it gets introduced. Where the answers are hard, the pages do not soften them — but they also do not flatten them into easy answers people on either side of a cultural argument want.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine. The Christian claim is that he was also God in human form.
• The Bible is the collection of Jewish and Christian sacred texts. The Old Testament is the older, longer part; the New Testament is the first-century AD writings about Jesus and his followers.
• The gospels are four short biographies of Jesus' life within the New Testament.
• Sin, in Christian writing, is not just naughty behavior. It is the broader condition of being out of alignment with how things were meant to be — and the specific acts that flow from that condition.

A few things up front

• Christianity centers love. Jesus' summary of the whole moral life was two commandments: love God, love your neighbor. The New Testament repeatedly says love is the test of the rest.
• It does not soft-pedal hard parts. Christianity has real positions on forgiveness, sex, marriage, family, anger, boundaries. These pages do not hide what those are. Some of them will not flatter your priors.
• Christianity is realistic about damage. Real harm done in relationships is not minimized. The Bible's response to abuse, betrayal, neglect, and exploitation is severe — much more severe than people often realize.
• Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Christianity teaches forgiveness as a posture of the heart. It does not teach that you have to return to someone who is harming you.

Where to start

If you are carrying a specific wound, the forgive someone who hurt me page is probably the entry point. If you are inside a sexuality or marriage question, those pages are direct. If you are dealing with family of origin that is not safe, the toxic-family and boundaries pages are for that.

None of these require the others. None require you to have figured out what you believe first.