The real thing

I just watched an episode of CSI which featured a host club, where women visited and chose a host from the meat book, who would then spend time with the paying female client.

During their time together, the host would cultivate a "relationship" with his client by listening to her, making her laugh and "making her feel like a queen", loved and respected.

Sex actually marked the end of the "relationship" so the meetings were mainly platonic.

What was horrifyingly tragic was that a stripper, Cotton Candy, who bared her body for money, had deluded herself into believing that Jesse, her paid host, who had another 24 other "relationships" at any one time, was "her fiancee".

While this is pure TV fiction, we cannot deny the very human need for love and acceptance in life.

We all crave for love, to be loved for who we are, unconditionally, totally.

Unfortunately, by today's standards, this most commonly translates into the physical level, sex.

You just have to tune into MTV to see scantily clad women who gyrate desperately to gain the attention of men.

Sexy has become the ultimate "testament" of womanhood.

The need for Cotton Candy to believe in something more than just sex harks back to the real meaning of relationships, intimacy that transcends the physical.

Emotional ties that are the backbone of all relationships.

However, because eros, carnality, is the most gratuitous and easiest adaptation of agape, a more selfless, sacrificial love, it is the most widely embraced.

After all, it calls for one to luxuriate in the sensate and hang the Puritanical, fiddly definition of love which demands way too much from a person.

Instant gratification beats happily-ever-after which only happens in fairy tales, going by today's divorce rates.

Why are absolutes so difficult to live by? Is relativism the season that is here to stay?

I hope not. I am, by nature, an idealist.

I believe that the sacrifice that God made, to be born as man and to consequently give his life to prove His love for ALL mankind is the ultimate form of love, and to honour the highest degree of love, I choose to live by a code that is increasingly seen as archaic and out-moded.

Never mind that at heart, it is the most practical and logical choice.

Reality has never been a very comfortable bed-fellow. Rationalism is infinitely more attractive.

While I know it's unlikely that I will find a life partner who has "clean hands and pure heart" despite my desire for marriage, I know I will not settle for less.

I have tried carnality and I can tell you that it is a pale second to the love that Jesus offers.

He is the embodiment of the perfect ""host", who delights in my imperfections and really loves me for who I am.

Best of all, His love is gift, with no price tag or strings attached.

If I never find a human spouse, then I am most happy to live with my heavenly one.

Sure, I sometimes yearn for a real human body to hug and who hugs me back in love, but if I have to settle for what Christopher West terms "counterfeit love" in his interpretation of JP2's Theology of the Body, I would rather wait for the real thing.

If not in this lifetime, then in the next.

Reality rules.