Join the Vallottons as they unwrap the mysteries of love, drawing from their own story that began just after Valentine's Day, 2010! They'll take you through the twists of their relationship, from the early days of butterflies and bashfulness to the profound bond they've nurtured over a decade. Love's true nature often gets lost in the clichés, but they're here to share how they found its deeper meaning and made it the cornerstone of their life together.
As they reflect on the question that puzzles poets and philosophers alike—"What is love?"—they offer their insights on distinguishing the fleeting from the forever. They'll explore the complexities that can be mistaken for love and discuss different forms of affection, from friendship to unconditional love, with Biblical and Greek definitions of love as the plumb line. But it's not all abstract; they'll also talk about the everyday choices and actions that sustain a lasting connection. So tune in, and let's celebrate love with a candid look at what it takes to make it thrive through every season.
Connect with Lauren:
Instagram
Facebook
Connect with Jason:
Jay’s Instagram
Jay’s Facebook
BraveCo Instagram
www.braveco.org
Join the Vallottons as they unwrap the mysteries of love, drawing from their own story that began just after Valentine's Day, 2010! They'll take you through the twists of their relationship, from the early days of butterflies and bashfulness to the profound bond they've nurtured over a decade. Love's true nature often gets lost in the clichés, but they're here to share how they found its deeper meaning and made it the cornerstone of their life together.
As they reflect on the question that puzzles poets and philosophers alike—"What is love?"—they offer their insights on distinguishing the fleeting from the forever. They'll explore the complexities that can be mistaken for love and discuss different forms of affection, from friendship to unconditional love, with Biblical and Greek definitions of love as the plumb line. But it's not all abstract; they'll also talk about the everyday choices and actions that sustain a lasting connection. So tune in, and let's celebrate love with a candid look at what it takes to make it thrive through every season.
Connect with Lauren:
Instagram
Facebook
Connect with Jason:
Jay’s Instagram
Jay’s Facebook
BraveCo Instagram
www.braveco.org
We're the Valentines and we are passionate about people.
Speaker 1:Every human was created for fulfilling relational connection.
Speaker 2:But that's not always what comes easiest.
Speaker 1:We know this because of our wide range of personal experience, as well as our years of working with people.
Speaker 2:So we're going to crack open topics like dating, marriage, family and parenting to encourage, entertain and equip you for a deeply fulfilling life of relational health.
Speaker 1:Alright, everyone welcome back to dates, mates and babies with the Valentines, and we should actually start out by saying happy Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2:Oh, happy Valentine's Day. How wonderful it is that Valentine's Day is on a Wednesday this year, just in time for your latest and greatest episode of dates mates and babies. With the Valentines, here we are.
Speaker 1:We're excited we're going to talk about a subject that you would imagine we would talk about on Valentine's Day I almost said Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:Thanksgiving. I know, when are you at?
Speaker 1:It's.
Speaker 2:Valentine's Day and we're going on a date tonight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are.
Speaker 2:Can't wait.
Speaker 1:Me too. I'm ready For dinner out.
Speaker 2:But in the meantime, while we wait for dinner out, let's talk about love. Why not?
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Jason and I were reminiscing Actually funny, we're not like huge Valentine's people. But well, let me say we're not huge Valentine's people in the sense of like there's not any like great expectations that we have. But the longer we've been married, the more we've come to realize that if you aren't a little bit intentional on Valentine's Day it just feels a bit disappointing.
Speaker 1:At the end of this, we're going to tell our funniest Valentine's story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know what you're thinking about. Okay, we'll save it for the end, but actually our little relationship has circled around Valentine's Day. I mean, we just have like that time of year is kind of significant for us because we actually started dating two days after Valentine's Day back in 2010.
Speaker 1:It's because Valentine's Day came and I was thinking about you the whole time.
Speaker 2:Stirred up all those feelings we had. So yeah, so Jason and I started dating a couple of days after Valentine's Day in 2010, and it was casual, with a little walk and a coffee and a tea, and then it turned a little bit more serious. Then we basically saw each other every single day from then on, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we did. Why would we not?
Speaker 2:I know because we were falling for each other.
Speaker 1:Hard.
Speaker 2:And we were talking this morning, actually, and reminiscing about just this part of our little relationship where we'd gone from dating to becoming more serious and more and more committed. And then there was this one day where we had spent the evening together. I remember having had dinner together and we had gotten your kids down and put to bed, and then we were hanging out on your back deck on the hammock.
Speaker 1:Remember this. Yeah, I do.
Speaker 2:And we'd been dating for several months and things were going really well and we were serious enough that I was now spending time with the kids and kind of doing the homework and dinner and bedtime routine a couple nights a week with Jason and the kids and we were really enjoying it. And Jay was ready to kind of move the relationship along and he was ready to make things a little bit more committed and official.
Speaker 2:And I started having all of these reservations come up and I remember one of the funniest things that I thought to myself in those months of our dating relationship was I don't know how to tell if I love him. How do I know if I love him? Which sounds like such a funny question, but I think valid question, it is a valid question.
Speaker 2:We had decided that we would not kiss each other until we could authentically say I love you. That is the reason why we made that our boundary was because at the time J's oldest son had you know, he was really kind of involving the kids in our dating relationship so that they, so he, could get a grip, for a grasp on how comfortable they felt with things, how much they understood about his dating process.
Speaker 1:I also wanted the kids to feel like a part, like they were powerful, yeah.
Speaker 2:He wanted the kids to feel powerful and involved in the process and he had asked Elijah at that time. You know, son, what is how? How do you feel about me kissing Lauren?
Speaker 1:Well, actually, the question I asked is what does it mean to kiss somebody?
Speaker 2:What does it mean to kiss somebody, right? And he said well, it means that you love them. And J went okay, cool. His definition of kissing is you would only do that if you loved somebody. Okay, cool. Well, that's going to be our standard then. I'm not going to kiss Lauren until I love her, because I don't want Elijah or the kids to be confused about what's happening. We're going to go with his definition, which that's a freebie right there. That's just a big old fat tip for any of you who are thinking of, you know, dating with kids in the picture and all of that. That's just such a great, such a beautiful model is helping your kids be powerful in that. Anyways, so that was our standard. So we knew okay, we're not going to kiss until we love each other. Well, I'll tell you what the feelings of wanting to kiss someone when you're dating them and you really like them Pretty strong.
Speaker 2:Really attracted to them, like I wanted to kiss him. But there was this question in my mind, but I don't know if I love him and how do I love him, how do I know? And I remember being on the hammock this one night and it was like the perfect spring evening. We were out on the hammock looking up at the sky, kind of cuddling on the hammock, and it was all romantic. Of course I wanted to kiss him, I wanted him to kiss me, but I just all of a sudden got hit with fear and I remember blurting out, kind of out of nowhere what is love? Like that was my question what is love? How do you know if you love someone? And I remember you laughing at me a little bit and then we actually talked about it and so today's episode is called what is love?
Speaker 1:Because everybody, it was dramatic in the moment.
Speaker 2:It was so dramatic, but I think it's a great question.
Speaker 1:That's such a good question.
Speaker 2:Let's unpack it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's such a good question that you really want to have a good grasp on and understand. People love this idea of love at first sight. Right, we love the.
Speaker 2:The movie view.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the thought that you could you see someone, and then I just knew, when I saw them, that I love them and that they were going to be the one for me. And like you just know when you know, you know that's a lot of our world.
Speaker 2:Well, it's the fairytale version and I think can I just stop and say that does happen for some people.
Speaker 1:Well, you and I are going to argue then.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll say, some people have that experience and then they do actually end up loving that person and marrying that person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It does happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what happens more often. So that's fair enough. Let's talk about love at first sight and what that is what people are really talking about is you have to understand what happens chemically when you see someone that you like, because that's really what's happening is when you see someone that you like, that's attractive, you get a release of dopamine to your brain, and that that release of dopamine is released as like this pleasure and reward feeling.
Speaker 1:So, all of a sudden, you have this like this, this chemical release in your brain that is creating feelings of excitement and happiness inside of you, which is amazing, yeah, and then you have a call dopamine, the feel good hormone.
Speaker 2:Right, it feels good.
Speaker 1:It feels so good, yeah. And then you have this release of adrenaline and, uh, norapheraphrin Sorry.
Speaker 2:No, I'm not friend. Yeah, that's a hard word, it is so hard, um, which which uh releases again.
Speaker 1:That's a hormone that leads to like increased heart rate and dry mouth and sweating, and but again like nervous excitement yeah it is, and all of this activates your reward center in your brain. So your brain has a reward center in it that basically when dopamine and um, adrenaline and norapheraphrin yeah, uh is released and even further on. So the the further you go into this, oxytocin is released, which again, is like it's a drug. It makes you feel amazing and your body goes. Get that.
Speaker 1:I want more of that Get more of that. That's what happens when you look at pornography as well, as all these chemicals are being being released into your body at a with with pornography at a very high level, but when you're just like when you see a really great looking girl on the beach, or man Brad Pitt walks by shirtless, you know Brad Pitt in legends of the fall.
Speaker 2:You mean yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what's happening, right? You get this release of chemicals into your reward circuit and your brain says I really like this. Yeah, this is working for me. Yeah, the same thing happens when you like lots of calories, a big Mac.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm like a big bowl of ice cream would do this. Mmm, it does. On another level, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so what's happening is your body is saying you like this, this is great, this feels so good, yeah, and instead of like, instead of really loving them, I'm loving what's happening to me. Yeah, and that's a really good indicator that like. By the way, I should say, none of these things are bad.
Speaker 2:No, this is naturally how our bodies are created wired. Yeah, there's a reason for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, and it's so cool because these are the feelings that let me know I'm interested, I'm attracted, right, I'm.
Speaker 2:Find out more. Yeah, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:But I have to go deeper and really find out, find out more, because if you mix love up with lust, you end up with a relationship that's based upon chemistry, yeah, and so we're going to talk a little bit about what love is, but the thing is that we have to understand in the very beginning you are in this chemically induced, sometimes lust not in a bad way I'm just being dramatic, right, but love is not that love is not the feeling of attraction.
Speaker 1:It can include it and it should include it. Yeah, but that when people say, like I knew I love them the moment I saw them, that's not what's happening. No, because love is not a feeling. No, it includes feelings but, it's not a feeling, and we just want to like really draw a line in the ground there with where our um, yeah, with what our definitions of love really are, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what is love?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, yeah, Okay. So you know, love is something that can't be separated from.
Speaker 2:It's like biblical definition. Yeah, like we, we know and experience love because God first loved us. That's what we read in the Bible. Yeah, that's what we read in the Bible. Yeah, that's the truth of scripture that our entire faith and life is built upon, that we have been loved by the God of the universe and as he has loved us, we are able to experience and then act in love towards one another. And I'm no Bible scholar.
Speaker 1:Come on, babe, don't sell yourself short.
Speaker 2:I'm no Greek scholar, but I do know a couple things, and I know that in the English language there's only one word for love, but in the Greek language there's actually four words.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's Jason. For love, the one word for love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the four words in the Greek language. Not all of them are actually found in the New Testament, but there are references to and depictions of each of these four types of love in the New Testament. The first one would be the love of like, friendship bond, like between Jesus and his disciples and between believers. It's the friendship bond kind of love and it's the word philia. Then there's the Eros type of love, which is that romantic love and there's references to like in first Corinthians, chapter seven, references to like for young believers follow God's plan for Eros love within the boundaries of marriage, because in the boundaries of marriage romantic love is a blessing from God.
Speaker 1:It's awesome.
Speaker 2:And then there's I might not pronounce this right, but it's like Storgue love, which is kind of like a it's more of a familial bond kind of, as I was reading. It's more of like the natural kind of like a parent to child. A parent has a hard time not loving its child. Like there's a bond there.
Speaker 1:Most of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then agape, love being this, this unconditional, perfect love that we experience directed at us from God, agape, and so you know these different. It's helpful to have a more dynamic definition of love because we know, even with just our one English language word for love, that there's lots of different kinds of love. Right, we forget the fact that, like we just unpacked, the reality of love can't just be a chemical feeling, it can't be purely an emotion. We know that in our human experience. But these breakdown, these four Greek words for love, I honestly feel like it does create such a more robust and dynamic understanding of love itself. But what we know to be true about love in the kingdom of God is that we're actually commanded by God to love him and to love each other so purely. The truth that we are commanded to love debunks any myth that love might purely be an emotion or a feeling you can't command a feeling.
Speaker 2:You cannot command an emotion.
Speaker 2:Love, in the most important sense, is an action, and it's an action directed at another person, directed at God, directed at people.
Speaker 2:And I think that's really helpful to know because when you get into these tricky places in relationships with one another and you're trying to decide where am I at with this person, there's a lot of questions you can ask yourself when you're asking yourself do I love them?
Speaker 2:It isn't as simple as what are my feelings for them, but it's actually. Do I have the capacity, the drive, the intention to direct my love towards this person? It's going to require an incredible amount of energy and intentionality and when we're kind of classifying our relationships, of course, when we're in that friendship zone with people there are, I do actually ask myself like, what capacity to love do I have with certain people in my life? And actually, although Jesus commands us to love even our enemies, we know that loving people in different circles of intimacy is going to be a very different experience. Me loving the person down the street that I don't know comes with a whole different set of intention than the person that I'm in a committed relationship with or in a deep friendship with, and so knowing what my actions are like in order to direct my love at different groups of people.
Speaker 2:that's, it's a helpful distinguisher.
Speaker 1:I love the description in the Bible about what love is. And love is patient.
Speaker 2:It's kind it's not self-seeking it's long suffering. It doesn't boast, it's not proud yeah.
Speaker 1:And because I think that that's that to me is like the rudder of a ship, for love is. I know that I'm in a great spot in my life when I'm doing those things right, like I love my kids. How do I know that I love my kids? Because I'm working on my patients, I'm working on my kindness, I am willing to suffer and do things that I don't want to do for them right, and I am checking my ego at the door. I'm doing all those things and same like I'm loving my wife. Well, what is loving my wife? Well, look like it. Looks like I'm being patient and kind and willing to suffer long.
Speaker 1:I know the way the world sees love. I tell people like love is not enough in the context of the way that the world sees and does love, because we know a lot of people who say I love my partner, you know like I love my husband, and it's like you say that you love your husband but you're not doing conflict, you're avoiding conflict. Or a husband say like I love my wife and yet they're not emotionally connected and you can really love somebody honestly but in order to have like a great marriage or a great relationship, love is and the biblical sense of love is an action Like the. Love requires that I don't do what I want to do, but I do what's best for us. The way that the world sees love, that kind of love is not enough for marriages.
Speaker 2:Well, and it doesn't last.
Speaker 1:It doesn't last. No, because you have to be willing to do conflict. You have to be courageous enough. My love for you gives me the courage to sit in hard conversations with you. That's what biblical love is supposed to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think about. Yeah, I think about how the Bible says that the fruit of the Spirit, the fruit of the Holy Spirit in my life, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Love is a fruit of the Spirit. So in God I have the ability to love. It's the fruit of the Spirit.
Speaker 2:But then, like you said in 1 Corinthians, we get a list of descriptors how is love characterized, what does love look like? And those definitions show me the distance between where I am today and how much I need to grow in order to love, like Jesus intends, my spouse, my children, my friends, my family. And that's important, because I really feel like that's important, because when we are able to see the distance between where I'm at today and how much I need to grow in order to become more Christ-like in my ability to love, we understand that it's actually a great decision. To love someone in a covenant sense is actually a great and powerful choice that we make. We don't luckily, we don't just fall and trip into love. We choose, ultimately, those deepest places. The covenant place of love is a big choice that we make and that's a sobering and important decision to make because it is a commitment to grow.
Speaker 1:When.
Speaker 2:I look at that list and I see how Jesus defines love, all the ways that he defines love, all the ways that the Bible defines and depicts what love is like. If I'm choosing to covenant, love you, I am choosing to go on a big fat learning curve journey of becoming all of those things Patient, long suffering, kind, not self-seeking, not boastful, not proud.
Speaker 1:It's such a tough like, it's such a crazy journey. I remember my dad tells this story when he's preaching. He was asking the Lord for more patience and I think it had to do with the grandkids and God said you don't need more patience, you need to love, more love. Yeah, because love is patient, right, and that kind of blew him away like oh gosh, and thinking through, like this year alone I've had, I don't know, several of my friends have either are either in a separation in the marriage or a couple of them ended up in affairs, and the confusion around the guys who have ended up in affairs whether it be emotional or physical affair has been around this topic of love and the confusion.
Speaker 1:Right, I know that that sometimes people listen to it and they go yeah, we know love's not a feeling yet blah, blah. And then you get into marriage. You get 10 years in the marriage and recently I met with someone and they're like I just I feel like I've never felt before I have, I have all these, you know like I've such a strong, we have such strong chemistry, right yeah, so just strong pull.
Speaker 1:And for me and I don't want to like kick the set horse too much, but I'm going to kick it a few times because I'm here, it's important yeah, we're talking about love is it really is so incredibly confusing for people when their emotions get involved and when you're in a marriage that that's tough, that's challenging. You have to really guard your heart because your brain goes it shouldn't be this hard, it should be fun, we should be, we should feel more connected and closer and that's all fine.
Speaker 1:But when you start to and that opens the door for people to experience somebody else right and they, they get that hit of dopamine and norepinephrine and oxytocin and then they go oh my gosh, I have never felt like this. Well, the truth is, you just can't remember when you felt like that right because you felt like that in the very beginning of your relationship.
Speaker 1:That's what happens in the very beginning with a novel relationship, right? But your love, that feeling, matures and grows and you build the bond with the person you're married with. But people get really confused when, again, you have the starts with this emotional connection with somebody. Then you think I've never felt this way before. Then you make a very poor choice, right, I'm. You think that you're in love, but you're not in love. You're just flooded in chemicals and lust and whatever you for you, and you leave your family and end up in a relationship that you never want to be in. So, anyways, I just really want to lay that out.
Speaker 2:It is a slippery slope.
Speaker 1:It's a slippery slope Because God's why it matters so much is. That's not God's definition of love. God's definition of love is patience, kindness, gentleness, humility, long suffering. It's all these things that that lead to a healthy, better life. It has very little to do with the emotions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And. And the emotions actually are either the chemical reactions that happen in the beginning, when that dopamine and all of those other chemicals are flying around in your brain, or they are the overflow of a deeply connected relationship where you have chosen to aim yourselves at one another.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's the gift you get as a result of building connection with each other.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:So in this beautiful empowered place where we live, where we get to choose who we love and who we aim our arrows, love at, I think that people I say people and I include myself like sometimes we forget the amount of intentionality that it is required in order to build the bonds of connection that actually produce that fruit of. Oh, I actually also enjoy this. I like this. This feels good. The feel good feelings, yeah, when you get that inside of a seasoned marriage, you know to freaking give yourself a clap because you have done some incredible work to build a bond of connection that then produces that kind of result and ultimately that is the gratifying lay your life down kind of love that Christ models, I mean the servant, kind of love that lays itself down over and over again to build a bond, to build connection. The fruit of that labor is the feel good stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, yes, it's there at the beginning for a whole nother host of reasons, because we are these, yeah, human beings who were created with this physical body and these neurological chemical components. But we also get to experience it later, when we've done the work of yeah the work of love.
Speaker 1:It's true. I think about it like building a house, when you start dreaming about your dream house right you're like, oh my gosh, it is amazing, we're going to build this new house and everyone's excited right. And then, when you get into the work of building that house, it's the labor, the labor right and you get into it.
Speaker 1:And you now, you follow the plan and you wake up every morning and you do what you have to do hammering the nails, screwing in the screws, painting the walls and you're not like, wow, this feels amazing. You're like, wow, we're doing something significant yeah then you get to spend the rest of your life, when you're finished living in what you've built totally and that feels a lot like a real relationship. Right, we get together the dream of what we could be and is amazing and then you start to actually lay the foundation and do the work and I think you know what I think moral of the story.
Speaker 2:Thank goodness that the model for love is not a whimsy. Comes and goes, flow of emotion, but it's this really empowered choice that we get to make it's robust it is robust and it is strong, and the kind of love that God offers us is not weak, it is not flimsy it doesn't, it doesn't break over time, and gosh, would we just be the kind of people that give ourselves to that kind of love come on, let's go well, it's Valentine's Day and you get to love on that special someone you have.
Speaker 1:I just want to warn all the men out there. Okay, listen, if you're listening to this right now and you did not plan, it's not shame on you, it's you better freaking. Push, pause and go figure out a plan right away, because I don't care what your wife says to you or girlfriend says to you at this point. She wants you to be intentional.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And over the years I have made this mistake. And here's why I made this mistake is because I wanted to be lazy. I didn't want to be intentional. I wanted to be.
Speaker 2:Now we're confessing.
Speaker 1:No, it's true, I wanted to do the bare minimum to get by. There's lots of reasons why, but that's the truth.
Speaker 2:They're all bad. They're all bad, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm tired. It's been a long work week. We don't have a lot of money. Whatever, it's only a, it's a it's man made holiday Just Valentine's. But the truth is is a great occasion to tell your woman how much you care for her.
Speaker 2:True.
Speaker 1:The years that I've blown, it has been such a bummer, baby you want to tell.
Speaker 2:Well, there's been a few you know, we've had a lot of Valentine's days and they haven't all been peachy. No, we've gone into some some serious disconnected arguments on Valentine's days before, one of which resulted in me sitting on the back porch by myself eating a bag of chips and beer drinking a. Beer drinking a beer and eating a bag of chips for Valentine's Day by myself. I banished Jay from my presence and told him I'll see you tomorrow. I'm going to have some time myself because this blows.
Speaker 1:Get out of my sight. Yeah, come back when you know how to be more intentional. It's dread. It's such a bad job she was out there.
Speaker 2:It's forgivable.
Speaker 1:Eating chips and drinking a beer by our pool.
Speaker 2:That was just like at least it was a nice day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was so mad at myself.
Speaker 2:That was years ago. It was so long ago.
Speaker 1:So, guys, be intentional, you know, do the little bit that it takes to make it awesome. Yeah, and you'll have a great life. All right, y'all.
Speaker 2:Simple as that. Have a great life.
Speaker 1:Hopefully you enjoyed this week's episode. You know, turn your love on. Make that powerful choice this week. If you love what we're doing, please leave a comment. Just take two minutes, guys, leave a comment, rate and review our podcast. That helps so much. Share it with a friend. Share it on your social media too, honestly. And, babe, this week, guess what we did? What we hit 200,000 downloads this week. Yes, that's because of people like you. Sharing it, sending it, sending it out, send us some love for Valentine's Day. Let us know how much you love what we're doing. So, otherwise, have an incredible week. We will see you next week on Dates, mates and Babies with the Ballotins. See you everyone.