How to Love a Whole Person

Unlike your car, your shoes or your sandwich, people can’t be deconstructed and customized. For better or for worse, we are who we are.

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

Finding someone to love is hard.

Is it fair to blame this on Subway 6" Sandwiches? I think so.

Here’s why: we live in an era of endless options. Accepting something as is, whether it’s a sandwich, a t-shirt or a hair color, just isn’t necessary anymore.

I drove past a Yankee Candle store today and they had a promo where you could print your own photo on a candle for five bucks. Because the tasteful ‘Berries on Snow’ logo designed by some poor art school grad just isn’t personal enough.

It’s not just choosing the things we want though. I recently started roasting a whole chicken every Sunday night so that I could have chicken soup leftovers through the week. My kids were fascinated by this. They asked about the bones, the neck, the hollow space in the middle where there used to be a heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

Their curiosity was driven by the fact that most of the time when we eat ‘chicken’, the parts that really made the chicken what it was — a walking, breathing organism — have been tossed.

Nobody wants to see a discarded beak or feathers when they’re just trying to grab a quick lunch! Instead, we prefer…