BibleProject | Rethinking Love and Romanceনমুনা

What comes to mind when you think about romantic love? A bouquet of red roses? Physical attraction? Dancing in the moonlight or sharing a candlelit dinner?

Maybe romantic love means being so strongly drawn to another person that you cannot imagine a life without them. Or maybe romantic love is about finding your soulmate or “the one”—the person who “completes you,” as Jerry Maguire put it. But is that the essence of real love or just part of it?

Does truly loving another person mean we will experience a sense of excitement similar to discovering a treasure, a sense that I've found something deeply valuable for me? Or is real love about something different, something more?

The concept of romantic love as we understand it today isn’t directly addressed in the Bible, partly because the authors wrote and compiled it long before the Romantic era. We do have some racy love poetry in Song of Songs, and we have stories about loving relationships and marriages between people. But we don’t see relationships that look like modern dating—no boyfriends and girlfriends, no partners (in the way we think of romantic partners today), and no diamond rings and elaborate marriage proposals.

So what can we learn about romantic love from the Bible?

Let’s consider three stories of loving relationships in the Bible that will help us get to the heart of romantic love—not the popular expectations surrounding modern romance, but the essence of true love.

But before we do, let’s first explore the ways the biblical authors use the word “love” (ahavah), and how they depict God as the ultimate source and goal of all human love.