Singleness and searching for your "mythos"

So, I read on till I got up to the chapter on 'Singleness and Marriage' in The Meaning of Marriage, by Tim Keller. I don’t know whether it’s such a great idea to read this book necessarily as a single person. I’ll confess that there were more than a few sighs and tears yesterday, of a perhaps rather self-pitiful nature, over how nice it would be to have someone who was committed to staying and working things through and growing and learning together and helping each other be transformed to be more like Christ (not to mention someone who might help when you’re injured and are finding some things hard and are just lying on the couch by yourself all weekend). But I’ve had some emotional distress lately, and perhaps it was all just seeping out ... with the pain and Nurofen and lying about thinking ... in the cry I had to have.

I did like this part:

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

I was having some misgivings in the chapter that went on, a lot, about how marriage “completes” us. Then in the chapter on singleness they actually address what this means for single people. And it would seem to mean being in community and friendship with people of the opposite gender (but we all know that that can get fraught with certain difficulties), because male and female together make up the image of Christ. This is interesting, but I think true. And it is actually one of the things that bothered me when everybody got on that Christopher Ash bandwagon a few years back, in that whatever was the solution to whatever was the “aloneness” problem in Genesis, it involved a person of the opposite gender. It wasn’t just some chums of the same gender, either for friendship or task completion (that and I can’t actually find anywhere in the bible where it says the answer to loneliness is friendship (or indeed that loneliness is a thing that needs an answer, if that's not Genesis 2) – and on a bad day I called Christopher Ash’s book the “single people aren’t lonely, they’re just useless book”, because in it we were told we don’t need a spouse for companionship, rather we need a spouse to do the task we were created to do – and while I don’t necessarily disagree with that and what it means for marriage, it actually puts single people in a worse place than loneliness, if you ask me). But, I digress.

In the chapter on singleness, the Keller’s write about what to look for in a marriage partner. This is where it got surprisingly interesting. Because apparently, women are always looking for men with money (and men for physically attractive women) where we should rather be looking for someone who, after character or virtue, plus mission and "future self", is part of what is called our “mythos”. But here’s the thing, as an NF personality type, I have always, always been looking for someone in my “mythos” (though I’ve never called it that) and never been interested in money. So, I wanted to cheer and shout ‘hooray’ at this point. Only I don’t know that it is so helpful, because I feel that the latter (the "mythos") is the harder thing to find. If all I wanted was a guy with money, well there are plenty of those around, on the lower North Shore of Sydney in particular (not that any of them have asked me out, though, so they are not really options). But I don’t. And I actually think I can detect a guy in my “mythos” fairly quickly. They say that among the temperament types the Ss should stick with other Ss, though all else might be opposite, and the Ns with other Ns. But the Ns are fewer, and often it doesn't take many conversations with someone for me to work out if they’re an N or not (and I have had this same conversation with many Ns), or I come across a blog post that makes me nod my head and say ‘ah, here is someone who is of the race that knows Joseph, or a votary of the blue flower, or a plain old kindred spirit ...’). (And even if you don’t believe in temperament types and all that, as certain temperament types don’t :), you still know when there is a connection with another person or not.)

So, what is this “mythos” they speak of:

Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” [I’ll leave in the ridiculous American punctuation.] C.S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favourite books, music, places or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God. Leonard Bernstein said that listening to Beethoven’s Fifth always made him sure (despite his intellectual agnosticism) that there was a God. Beethoven’s Fifth doesn’t do that for me. But everyone has something that moves them so that they long for heaven or the future kingdom of God (though many nonbelievers know it only as bittersweet longing for “something more”).

Sometimes you will meet a person who so shares the same mythos thread with you that he or she becomes part of the thread itself. This is very hard to describe, obviously.

This is the kind of comprehensive attraction you should be looking for in a future partner.

Well, you can bring that here. I’d be very pleased to have that. (Why it's the Sehnsucht isn't it? – but I can't help questioning whether some people are going to read this section and wonder what on earth he's on about.) The thing is, after reading the first chapter, on how we can be unrealistic about what sort of compatibility we’re after and so on, I thought perhaps I would need to abandon all this “soul mate” stuff if I wanted to get married (the NFs are the soul mate people – it just goes with the poetry). But what Keller describes above is, to me, exactly the stuff soul mates are made of. So now I am confused. I need to think more about how this all fits together.

(Note: I have since gone back to the "soul mate" section in chapter one, where I found that Tim does say that when he met Kathy he sensed very quickly a "kindred spirit", over books and ways of thinking and experiences that brought them joy (these are my people!), but that what most people mean by "soul mate" is actually physical attractiveness and sexual chemistry. I'm definitely in the "kindred spirit" definition of soul mate camp. So, I'm rather relieved I have been given permission to keep that, in some form.)

POSTSCRIPT: Lucidus has written an excellent post redrawing the distinction between Keller's use of "Mythos" and what CS Lewis intended in his use of Sehnsucht, or the "inconsolable longing". I recommend you read it!