Apologist Jimmy Akin offers guidance to a caller struggling with hope, faith, and direction after experiencing heartbreak.
Transcript:
I had a question about the idea of kind of holy suffering, or at least justified suffering for the sake of growth.
And a little bit of backstory is that like five months ago I had a breakup with somebody who I thought was the person—I still think they are the person. I asked myself, the outlook currently looks—if we think of it entirely without some divine intervention—that outlook looks very bad.
And so I think, what is the purpose of the suffering if I don’t see any alternative future for me? Because I don’t see myself becoming a priest, just a very faithful cat. And it’s made me struggle and falter, and there’s been days where I’ve missed my rosary and days where I’ve missed my Bible reading because I think, oh, what the heck?
And so I’m wondering, how do you progress forward? How do you find a justification for your suffering so that it might not seem as purposeless?
Well, you can’t always find a purpose for suffering in this life. This is something the catechism talks about. It says that, you know, God would not permit any evil unless He was going to bring about, you know, basically an equal or greater good out of that very evil.
And whether the evil is sin or suffering, we won’t always know the answers to why this particular suffering or why did God allow this particular suffering or why did God allow this particular sin? That’s something we’re going to have to wait till the next life to figure out when we see the big picture.
And so the catechism acknowledges we often can’t figure out in this life why did God allow this specific evil? We know that He’s got a reason. There’s some greater good. We just can’t always figure that out in this life.
And what I would say in regard to your situation—first of all, I’m very sorry that this happened. It is not uncommon. Everyone who puts themselves out trying to find someone, you know, romantically to marry, people get hurt. And that’s a normal part of the human experience.
You know, there’s even that famous rock song that I might know the artist—I’m blanking on it—but love hurts. I think, yeah, but, you know, it’s a part of the human experience, especially in cultures like ours that prioritize romantic marriage over other forms of marriage, where romance doesn’t really come into it.
Love ultimately grows. And it’s meant to grow in marriages, but it’s a love of—it’s not romantic love. That’s something that comes and goes in life. Oh, I’m told “Love Hurts” is by Nazareth.
What we can do is look at what’s the purpose of the negative emotions that we experience when we suffer a romantic loss that we didn’t desire. The purpose is the same as the negative emotions we experience with any kind of loss.
It’s, you know, whether it’s, you know, let’s say a loved one dies, or you lose a job, or someone steals all your money and you’ve lost all your money, or you’ve lost a romantic partner—all of these hurt, and they’re all based on a common underlying principle, which is loss aversion. Humans are averse to loss. We really hate losing stuff.
We hate losing stuff even more than we get excited by getting stuff. The reason is because we grew up in an environment that was resource poor. We grew up in a situation of scarcity. And if you’re in a situation of scarcity, it’s more important to keep what you have than to get even more. Because if your resources are scarce and you lose your resources, you’re at a world hurt.
And so just for survival purposes, you need to at least keep what you had. And so since we grew up in an environment of scarcity, we are loss averse as a species. We really hate losing stuff.
And so the purpose of those emotions is to motivate us to not lose stuff, to do whatever it takes to try to keep hold of what we have. But we can’t always do that. You know, people are going to die. We’re not in control of other people’s free will. And they might, before we’ve committed to a permanent relationship with someone, they might change their mind.
You know, they might—we might even get married to them, and then they might change their mind. We can’t control other people’s free will. So it’s understandable that we have loss aversion and that we feel these painful emotions that are meant to help us try to avoid losing things.
But we ultimately aren’t in control of those things. And that leads to another point, which is something you mentioned briefly. You thought that this former romantic partner was the one.
And you said, I think you still think the person is the one. I would encourage you to not look at it that way. There is—unless God divinely reveals to you that there is one and only one person for you—there’s probably not.
There’s probably lots of people you could marry. There may be people who would be out there who would be even better to marry. The idea that there’s this one person, this soulmate that you got to find—it’s not just, this is not true.
For almost everybody, there are numerous romantic partners that would be perfectly fine and that would bring joy into your life as well as struggles. And that’s going to be the case for everybody because life and certainly marriage involves struggles.
But there are numerous people for basically everybody that could be successful marriage partners. And so don’t think about it in terms of, oh, I’ve ruined it with the one and now I’ll never find it. There’s no one equivalent to this person. There are lots of them. Don’t limit yourself that way.
So, you know, and that of itself, I think will help recontextualize the loss in a way that makes it not as painful. To realize, okay, it didn’t work out with this person this time, and that’s sad, but there are other fish in the sea, as they say.
And you can be happy with someone else. And if you keep trying and you get back in the game, you will be.
Jack, I hope all that is helpful to you. We have to take a break now, but thank you very much for the call. More ask me anything, with Jimmy Akin coming right up!