Do You Really Want a Relationship?

Wishing for a thing is not the same as truly desiring it.

“If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were,” says the Anglican mystic William Law, “Your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”

Hard words, all the more so because they’re true.

There is a great difference between what might be called wishing for a thing and truly desiring it. Wishing for something means that you like the idea of it and, if it didn’t take any effort or uncertainty, you think would be quite pleased to have done it. Or, at the very least, we feel that it is something we ought to want and so tell ourselves that we do want it, and that we would be going after it if not for such-and-such a circumstance.

I think a lot of the things we claim to want are in this category.  

We say we like the outdoors, or that we would like to travel, or that we want a relationship. We may even make some easy, halfhearted efforts in that direction, such as reading up on foreign places or making up a profile on CatholicMatch. But we go no further.

We never book a flight or work out a way to budget for the trip. We don’t make overtures to people we find or respond to those we receive. We play with the idea, but we never commit to it.

But to truly desire something is different. That is when you want the thing itself, for its own sake. We think of it often and give our time and attention to figuring out how to achieve it. We’re excited by every small step that leads us that much closer to its accomplishment.

This is when the wish goes beyond a pleasing fantasy to become a real motivating force. It becomes, as it were, incarnate in action.

For instance, a man who says he ‘would like’ to travel to Japan might spend time reading up on the country, or enjoy relics of Japanese culture, but he won’t go any further.

He ‘wants’ to go to Japan in the same sense that he ‘wants’ to be a millionaire; it is a pleasant fantasy that conceivably could happen at some point. But the man who truly desires to see the Land of the Rising Sun won’t just stop at speculation; he’ll figure out the cost of the trip and carefully budget for it, spend time every day learning the language, and book a flight months in advance so that he’s fully committed to the journey. His desire takes on form by driving him to real and ongoing effort to achieve it.

In other words, you may judgewhether you really want something by what you do to acquire it, and what youreally desire is shown by what you in fact do.

Now, if you will here stop and honestly ask yourself what your real actions say about your desires, most likely you will find that they are not at all what you would have thought or wanted them to be. Most of us will probably find that watching funny videos on YouTube or engaging in meaningless chatter on social media hold a higher priority with us than serving God or pursuing what we describe as our dreams.

And in the realm of relationships, we probably will find that, judging by how we go about it, we don’t really want to form one at all.

Oh, we have our profile up and we pay the premium, but we never reach out to anyone or respond when they reach out to us. We don’t keep our profile updated. We never exchange contact information or go beyond light conversation over the internet. In short, our ‘wish’ for a relationship does not motivate us to make a serious effort to bring it about, which means that we don’t seriously want it after all.

Now, there may be many reasons for this. You may find, on examination, that there are things in your life you want to put in order, or flaws you wish to correct before you seek out someone to share your life with. If such is the case, it may be very sensible to take a step back from online dating until you’re ready to commit to it.

But, most likely, you’ll find thatthe reason is nothing so serious, but simply a reluctance to step out of yourcomfort zone and venture into the unknown adventure of a real relationship, notessentially unlike your reluctance to get out of bed on a cold Monday morning. Ifsuch is the case, then you probably will feel that you want to want a relationship, but simply don’t at the present.

If so, there is good news.

In the same way that our actions reveal our desires, they also, in large part, create them. The more we act toward a certain goal, the more we will desire that goal, regardless of how we felt about it at first. This is how we are trained to want what we ought to want. What we pretend to be, we generally become in truth.

Thus, ask yourself what you would do if you truly desired a relationship and then do that. Do it especially if you don’t want to. Schedule regular times to search CatholicMatch, make yourself send out messages and respond to every answer you get, keep your profile up to date, and do whatever else you can think of. If you keep it up, sooner or later you will start to desire it for real and then…

Well, that’s when things get interesting.