Love Geometry: The Exception to the Rule

There’s always an exception to a rule, isn’t there? It’s something we learn from the very beginning. (Just ask my four year old. He knows that we don’t have dessert for breakfast. Unless it’s Saturday and daddy bought doughnuts.) So I have to confess, I have one exception to the love triangle rule.

As a writer of Christian romance, there will always be a love triangle of sorts in my novels. It’s based on one of the few positive take-aways I have from my high school youth group. (Though saying that, I’m not 100% sure it actually came from my youth pastor and not from a speaker at a larger event that we attended. Regardless, I associate it as one of the few positives, and I’m all about focusing on the positives, so we’ll go with that!) In every romantic relationship you have a man and a woman and you also need to have God. So you end up with a triangle that looks something like this:

Generally, relationships start out something like this. You have the relationship between the man and God on line a, the relationship between the woman and God on line b, and the relationship between the man and woman on line c. In a solid relationship, where the relationship with God is primary, you’ll see the man and woman both growing closer to God and, as an effect of that, growing closer to one another as well.

But, in a non-ideal world, if only one party grows closer to God, it throws your triangle off and ends up harming the relationship between the man and the woman.

Or, you can end up with the couple growing closer to one another and neglecting their relationship with God, causing them to grow farther from Him (or at a minimum, remain stagnant in their growth.)

That example has stuck with me for many years. It was incredibly relevant to me as a teen (most of the guys I dated were not Christians, the reasons behind that are a story for perhaps another time) and I’ve seen it play out in all 3 scenarios (thankfully I wised up in college and met and married an incredibly Godly man – and we do spur each other on to a deeper relationship with Christ.) So it’s one that I find works its way into the heart of my stories – because if your relationship with God is out of whack, it’s going to have far reaching ramifications.