Dear Jerry Maguire, I don’t complete Catherine

I’ve already told you Catherine hates chick flicks, right?

Regardless, most people who were watching movies during the 1990s have seen Jerry Maguire, the great movie about a sports agent who finds true love. There are a few very memorable lines from this movie, including when Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) bursts into a divorce recovery group and announces, “You complete me.”

It’s enough to make any hard-edged, cynic melt.

But should it?

Here’s something I want everyone to know.

I don’t complete Catherine.

I love her more than I could ever imagine.  I love the way she giggles at my dumb jokes, I love how she loves me with her whole heart, and I couldn’t live without her constant affection.

But, my love for her doesn’t “complete” her and it never will.

Hafeez Baoku, author of Sex, God, and the Single Life, explains why this romcom quote and general principle was actually harmful to him when he was single:

There isn’t a human being on the planet who has the capacity to complete me and make me whole. By putting all my hope for a “happily ever after” in a spouse, I made singleness my problem and marriage the solution. Yet this is not what God intended. Sure enough, the more I searched for fulfillment in others, the more miserable I became. In my singleness, my heart was longing to be satisfied with something greater than a relationship. I just didn’t know what that could be.

As much as I believe in “happily ever after,” I agree with Baoku – this “you complete me” stuff is way too much pressure to put on your spouse. He goes on to unpack this further:

I once heard something helpful from a Christian counselor regarding sexual wholeness. He explained that since most people falsely think of marriage as the addition of two people, they operate with this equation:

½ of me + ½ of him/her = 1 happy, satisfied relationship

Instead of the addition of two incomplete people, however, marriage is more like the multiplication of two incomplete people:

½ of me x ½ of him/her = ¼ bitter, frustrated relationship

If we’re longing for another person to complete us we will enter relationships looking for them to perfectly meet all our needs—a job that only God can do.

This counselor went on to explain that relationships are primarily about giving, not getting; serving, not being served; pleasing, not being pleased; loving, not being loved. Therefore, he suggested, we ought to live by a new formula—God’s formula—which says:

1 satisfied me x 1 satisfied him/her = 1 satisfied relationship

Such sexual wholeness only occurs when you’re satisfied in Jesus Christ and made whole through him. As you follow him, you begin to experience the overwhelming grace of God that alone frees you to serve others with self-giving love.

I agree.

That means that I don’t complete Catherine.  She is a wonderful person with or without me.  (But I am really, really happy that she chose me back!)

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