How you can be a truly great lover

FEBRUARY 14 is St Valentine’s Day, when we celebrate our relationships, and in particular our boyfriend/ girlfriend/husband/
wife.

It’s the time of year when flowers shoot up in price and when the pubs and restaurants all get booked up for evenings out.

And, of course, we might send, or receive, a card from an unknown admirer.

St Valentine’s Day is a great excuse for anyone who loves to be romantic and who finds it easy to show affection.

But what about the rest of us? How can the average Brit, normally a little backward in coming forward and who finds a terrifying disconnect between Love Island and “life as I know it”, live life in a way that honours love and all our relationships? And not just for one day a year.

Check your kiss

There’s something vulnerable and selfless about a genuine kiss. It is a moment shared, a still point in time, when we for once are not thinking about ourself.

We are wholly concerned with the other person and our response is focused on them.

Author Rob Parsons tells the story of a lady who had to have an operation to remove a tumour in her cheek which resulted in one of her facial nerves being cut. It left her with a permanently twisted mouth.

“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asked the surgeon.

“Yes, it will,” he replied. “The nerve was cut. I’m sorry.”

The lady nodded and was silent.

But her husband, who stood by the bed, smiled. “I like it,” he said. “It’s cute.”

Then he bent down to kiss his wife’s crooked mouth.

The surgeon watched, moved by the husband’s love.

As he kissed her, the man twisted his own lips to accommodate hers to show her that their kiss still worked and that he still loved her.

Practise the art of praise.

“That was a lovely meal. I really enjoyed it, thank you.”

“You look really great.”

“Thanks for sending me that text. I was feeling a bit low and it made my day.”

When you are praising someone, you are not just making them feel good, you are telling them how you feel about them, even if it is only a small thing.

You are saying what you appreciate about them, what it is they do that makes you feel good.

Praise is the best way of telling anyone you love them. It says: “You are okay. You are special.”

Try it; it costs nothing but if there is a healing balm for any relationship, it starts here.

Give and forgive.

When you love someone, you give yourself. That makes you vulnerable and you can get hurt. Trust can be betrayed, or harsh words can be said.

The temptation is to hurt back, to lash out, to walk out, to get revenge.

But good lovers put their energy not into revenge but into making up, into saying sorry, into building bridges. Good lovers know how to forgive and even forget. They don’t hold grudges.

You may be thinking, “After what I went through, I can’t possibly forgive. No one can do that.”

But forgiveness is
possible.

There is a kiss which accommodates the world’s twistedness.

There is a word of praise for you, and for me, which overwrites the criticism we make of ourselves or which others heap upon us.

There is one who gave all, so that our broken relationships might be healed and that we might know the power to forgive, even as we have been forgiven.

This is the divine lover, who kissed the earth with his blood, who spoke his Father’s love for us all, who gave himself to be the bridge to heaven, where love is forever and whose Spirit pours the love of God into the hearts of men and women even today, even here.

This lover is Jesus. He bears all the marks of love — on his hands, for you to see.

Of course, it is not true that only Christians know anything about love. God can use human love to speak to anybody, faith or no faith.

But it is my view that the nature of love is truly revealed in the person of Jesus in a way that we can all grasp and on which way he invites us to follow him. St John writes: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all.

Canon Kevin Davies, team rector of the Langtree Ministry, honorary canon of Christ Church Cathedral and former area dean of Henley