Age of Entertainment: "Love"

After the age of Enlightenment, this age will be known as the age of Entertainment.

We spend more in our lives on Entertainment than we do on just about everything else
for our media players, our computers, our TVs, our media collections. We pay our actors and sports players obscene amounts of money to entertain us on a regular basis. As a result that entertainment shapes us we get our ideas about life from our media and entertainment.
And it works. Media influences us. If it didn't why would there be commercials?

Because it shapes us, we believe what it tells us about life. And very prominently, love. We see couples on TV and movies and in our songs who are madly deeply in love, all the time. And that becomes our frame of reference. So we marry for what we think is love/romance/whatever, and when the reality of life doesn't match that expectation, people might try to make it. We might give it our best shot, But in a quick fix society, it's easy to take the quick fix.

It's deeply troubling to me that couples tend to spend much more time preparing for the first day of their marriage and not for the rest of their lives.

The truth of the matter is that love is there. It really is. It just doesn't look like what we see in the media. It can sometimes look like being so frustrated with your spouse that you can't see straight and deciding in that moment to work it out. It looks like being honest, even when the honesty is the worst thing you can do.

We allow ourselves to be shaped by what we choose, and many of us choose to allow the media to shape us.

And in fact, not only can the media be destructive in our mindsets about love, but just as much or more so about sex. That's the absolute worst thing about porn. Well, maybe not as bad as the degredation of the people involved in it, but the thing about porn is that it sets guys (and some girls) to have expectations about what sex is. And porn is the furthest thing from God's idea about sex.

Sex viewed from a pornographic standpoint is basically just mutual masturbation. And for a guy to go into a marriage expecting his wife to do what porn stars do is so incredibly destructive I can hardly put it into words. And regular media depictions of sex to a lesser degree, but still destructive.

We have to be responsible consumers of media. Not all media is bad and not all entertainment is bad. But as followers of Christ, we have to understand how the media affects us and our journey to being like Jesus. Sorry if this was a bit scattershot, but it's trying to get some ideas down...