In the middle of a culture filled with dating apps, hookups, and high divorce rates, finding true love can feel next to impossible. On top of this, the barriers to finding love are amplified by a misunderstanding of what love is and how it is shown.

This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Jason Evert, co-founder of The Chastity Project, to discuss why and how we should reject the cultural lies targeting human love.

Parents, please note that this episode touches on some mature content, so please be cautious if listening with young children.

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Family Policy Matters
How to Find True Love in Today’s World (with Jason Evert)

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Today’s guest travels the world with his wife, sharing the truth that God’s plan for human love is the thing that truly satisfies the depths of the human heart. Jason Evert and his wife, Crystalina, co-founded The Chastity Project, and have spoken to more than 2 million people on six continents about God’s plan for human love. He has written more than 15 books on the topics of love and purity, and he joins us today to explore why and how we should reject the cultural lies targeting human love. Jason Evert, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

JASON EVERT: Thanks for having me on.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, we’ll start off. What are some of these lies that are being told about our identity and love today?

JASON EVERT: Well, I think when it comes to love, I think it would start off with thinking that love is a feeling. And if we think love is a feeling, then you hear people say, Well, you know, I love you. I’m just not in love with you anymore. But the reality there is that they probably never loved the person to begin with. They just loved the way that the person made them feel. And those feelings of being in love are great, but that’s just the beginning. The raw material of love. For love to mature, it has to go beyond love as desire or attraction, to love as benevolence, meaning I want what’s best for you instead of I want you as a good for me. And so, until we can get to that place of actually willing the good of the other, then we might experience feelings of attraction or infatuation. But in order for it to reach the point of authentic human love, then it needs to transcend that to a point of actually willing to do what is good for the other.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. So how did we get here to this place where we don’t understand true love?

JASON EVERT: Well, I think it’s good for the human heart to aspire and desire for a beautiful love. I think that’s a natural thing. It’s a good thing. But oftentimes the world goes by the way of the family. You know, as the family goes, so goes the entire world. And so often people are raised and broken or dysfunctional families, and all of us are to some extent, but we don’t see what it’s supposed to look like. And a lot of times we put boundaries around our heart. I’m not going to get married because I don’t want to get divorced. And so, in their desire for protection, they put a shield around themselves, but it eventually becomes somewhat of a coffin, because the thing that they desire the most – love – requires what they fear the most, which is vulnerability. And so, they’ve got to learn how to get into a safe place where they can learn how to trust their gut again and not give up on love, because if they do so, I think they’re ultimately giving up on themselves.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, if someone is from what we normally have called a broken home, and they don’t have those examples of true love that they can see in their own lives, what are some steps they can take so that they can open themselves up as you say?

JASON EVERT: Well, one thing, I would dedicate yourself to your own healing process. If that means going into counseling, go do that. Make sure you’re taking care of your own human needs, getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, do that basic human stuff, because life is stressful enough when you’re not doing those things. So, you’ve got to be able to make sure you’re doing the basics. Commit yourself your own healing process. Surround yourself with good couples. There are good married mentor couples that I’m sure would take you under their wing and just to see okay, real love does exist. Just because I didn’t see a good family growing up doesn’t mean that I can’t have one. Maybe I’m supposed to break a chain of dysfunctional, broken marriages, because sometimes these things go back generationally, and so maybe it can end with you, meaning you can initiate a new kind of family that your kids are actually going to look up to. So, try to think of that as perhaps your calling and your mission.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: How do these young people even start? We hear so much about the online culture, the hookup culture. Where do they go to meet other people who might be seeking this kind of love?

JASON EVERT: Oh, I heard one man once say, Look, don’t run after, Is she the one? Is he the one? He said, Look, with everything that you have run after God and after a while of running, then look beside you and see who’s keeping up with you. That’s the kind of person that you want to end up staying with. I heard another man say that marriage is the kind of game where the championship is won at the time of the draft, meaning, so much depends upon your ability to make a good marriage choice. Not simply am I attracted this person, but do I actually admire them? Do they bring out the best in me? Do they actually possess virtue? Because it doesn’t matter if a guy marries Miss Universe, and if she’s not a woman of virtue, you’re going to have a miserable marriage. And so if you’re not sure who to pick, don’t go Lone Ranger, meaning it’s just her and I against the world. I mean, that’s immature. Well, we’ve got to be able to say is like, look at any president, prime minister. They always surround themselves with the cabinet of advisors, and if they know how to listen well, they’re going to govern wisely, but if they’re full of hubris and arrogance, they’ll drive the whole nation into ruin. Same would go into human relationships. Try to tap into the collective wisdom of people whose opinions you admire and respect, because if you’ve got them all saying, hey, no man, green light, full steam ahead, gives you a lot of reassurance, whereas, if the people who love you say, you know we really want what’s best for you, but we really do see some red flags here. To be able to have the humility to listen if people can see some warning signs that we might be wanting to overlook.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so you talk about pornography. How much does that play in our skewed sense of what love is.

JASON EVERT: It’s massive. For one you think of maybe a woman’s perspective who’s expected to live up to these things, she’s like, well, I just can’t compete with these women. And it’s like, well, yeah, you can’t, because they can’t compete with each other. Because if they could, then there’d be, like, one pornographic website with one person, and everybody would just go there. But the fact is, it just trains the user in the habit of mental polygamy, and robs him or her of the capacity to be captivated by a single person. And so, it trains you, like from a man’s perspective, to essentially value a woman based upon how much lust she generates in me. And if I don’t feel as lustful as this one or that one, then I don’t give that one the time of day, and so it essentially emasculates a man. It makes him deeply effeminate. There was a philosopher and Saint named Thomas Aquinas who said that what effeminacy is now, this is not femininity. It’s not same sex attraction. Effeminacy is when a man refuses to let go of what is pleasurable in order to do what is arduous, good, and difficult. That makes a man effeminate. And if you think about that, porn has effeminized an entire generation of men where we don’t want to actually let go of what it is pleasurable and to do what is actually good and arduous, family commitment, sticking with one person. Nah, that’s too much work. I’d rather just have an erotic moment with my laptop. And you wonder why more and more women are identifying as asexual and non-binary. Like, look, I don’t even want to be part of this whole thing. It’s a natural response of protection against a man who doesn’t even know how to look at a woman rightly, let alone how to treat her properly. I had a friend in college, and he looked at pornography, and had quite a bit of it, and figured, I’ll just throw it away when I get married. And he did get married, they were divorced in three months. He just took all that lust he had for porn, looked at his wife that way, and the marriage was over as soon as it began. And so, we’ve got to ask ourselves, like, what am I training myself for? Because marriage is not the fulfillment of porn. Porn is the distortion of human love. And so, the enemy of love isn’t passion and desire, like those are good god given things, but lust twists them to the point of you’re reducing another person to their sexual value instead of their personal value. And so, it’s no surprise why such relationships just can’t stand through the test of time.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, I’ve heard people say too that there’s an impact of pornography that actually changes the brain. Is that true?

JASON EVERT: Oh, it’s absolutely true. I mean, one of the most easily trained part of the brain is the medial pre optic nucleus. Is the pleasure center of your brain. You think of the test that Pavlov did with his dog. Ring the bell, feed the dog. Ring the bell, feed the dog. Eventually, all he had to do is ring the bell on the dog’s mouth would salivate. It’s considered a trained response. And so, if I train my brain to associate sexual joy with what is dirty, illicit, forbidden, sexual and always a brand-new person in fantasy. Well, I’m actually training myself to be aroused by what is not a stable, committed, romantic, long term monogamous relationship. Because, look, a wife is not dirty, forbidden, illicit, brand new, novel, airbrushed supermodel. Like no, this is real life. And I just train myself essentially to have porn goggles for 15 years, and then I think I’m just gonna get married. And it’s just, oh, marriage is the fulfillment of porn. I remember speaking in all-girls’ high school, and the teacher told me she brought a bunch of college guys into the class to talk to the girls during their spring break of how do they stay strong in their Christian faith in college. During the conversation, it came up that one of the guys looks at porn, and the teacher said to him, Well, don’t you think that could present a problem in your marriage? He said, Well, why would that be a problem in marriage? He said, Isn’t that what a wife is for? It’s like, no, no, no. That’s actually not what a wife is for, something to be used.

And a woman is very perceptive in the way that a man looks at her, and if he’s looking at her as a thing just to be consumed, at first, if she has a low self-esteem, it’ll seem flattering that she’s desirable. But when she realizes it’s not really her that he desires, but the pleasure that he can get at her expense, she naturally kind of recoils and feels defensive in his presence, and rightfully so. But you read the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, it says that the bride is talking back and forth to the groom, and she said, I was as in his eyes, as one who finds peace. And it’s this beautiful language of just the way that he looks at her fills her heart with peace, because she knows that he’s looking at her as this respected and beloved companion. What lust does, it robs men and women of the capacity of that true form of intimacy, where they’re actually seeing the other person, and not just the pleasure that they can get from them.

So yeah, the brain is trained through habitual use of pornography. It resets the pleasure thermostat of the brain, where you need more novelty and this and that and that, and you’re never quite satisfied by it. And so yeah, it does change brain chemistry. We’re talking about the addictions, same kind of stuff that heroin would affect in the brain. But the good news is the neuroplasticity of the brain, it can be retrained. It does take time, according to how long you’ve been hooked on the junk and the severity of it, but it’s an effort worth doing, because what’s at stake is our capacity to love.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Well, let’s talk about that, because we do know, statistically, as good as the statistics could possibly be on this, that pornography is much more pervasive than we might even imagine, especially in the church. I think it’s surprising. So, what about people who are listening to this and they’re like, that’s me. I need to break free from that. What do you suggest that they begin to do to start them on this road toward purity?  As a wider sense, though, beyond even pornography, this skewing of love that we have, give us some pointers as to how we can move toward that ideal.

JASON EVERT: Yeah, I mean, I’ve had kids tell me, and adults like, you know, I’ve tried everything to break free from porn, and I just keep falling back into it. And you’re the first person I’ve ever told. It’s like, okay, if I’m the first person you’ve really opened up to about this, you clearly haven’t taken the most important step, which is accountability. To not try to fight this thing on your own. Find someone in your faith community that you can be honest and accountable with this. I had read of one evangelical guy living a very duplicitous life, finally broke down and told a Christian guy. And the other guy said, Well, if what you really want to do is look at porn and do that stuff and just go ahead and do it. And the guy’s like, what? And he said, Yeah, what you really want to do is look at porn and do all that stuff, then just go ahead and do it. And he was perplexed, because he knew this other guy was a solid guy, and he just pounded his desk. And he said, No, that’s not what I really want to do. And the guy looked at him and said, exactly. And for him, it was this watershed moment. He realized he wasn’t this deprived, horrible human being. He had desires, he had wounds, and he was living out of those wounds, but he ached for something that was a real, pure love. And so, by opening up to other people, we can make a lot more progress than we’re just trying to battle this thing on our own.

In the meantime, yeah, you should get apps on your phone. There’s all kinds of stuff that you could use to help block this content. But in the end, you have the power to control your body. Man, if you were hooked on the stuff and your house started burning down, you’d be like, Oh, I can’t stop looking. I’ll just die. No, you just shut the laptop and leave, because your body will do it to tell you to just lack the motivation. So what motivation is greater than lust? There’s only one. It’s love. And so, to trash this stuff, you’re actually loving your children, you’re loving your spouse, you’re loving God. And so that expression of love, to me, is what’s necessary to find freedom. And this isn’t just the guys. There’s lots of women wrestling with this as well. Lust is not a guy problem. It’s a human problem. So, whether it’s the books, whether it’s the website, whatever it is, we’re all subjected to temptation, but God can give us victory if we humble ourselves and realize we can’t do this on our own, but he’ll give us every grace that we need.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: As a wider sense, though, beyond even pornography, this skewing of love that we have, give us some pointers as to how we can move toward that ideal.

JASON EVERT: There’s a woman I met. She told me that she’s been married for 30 years, and she said, You know the last date my husband took me on? She said it was the night he proposed to me 30 years ago, and he’s never taken me on another date since. Three decades. No dates. Contrast that to a buddy of mine. He’s been married for more than 20 years, and never once has he ever missed his weekly date night with his bride in 20 years. Rain or shine, he takes her on a date. He’s also taken her on more than 80 honeymoons, not all to Italy or wherever, but they’re so intentional in continuing to pursue each other in that marriage. Because when the Bible says a man shall leave his father and his mother cleave to his wife, the Hebrew word for cleave does not mean like cling like a barnacle on the side of a ship. It can be translated as hotly pursue, meaning you get married, then you continue the pursuit. And imagine kids who grow up in such an environment, the stability that that gives them to see their parents still in pursuit of one another despite all the trials that they’ve been through. Because when we don’t see that, we end up with a culture like this, a culture of single people who pretend like they’re dating. While the dating people behave like they’re married, and the married people seem to think they’re single. Everything is just out of order.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. Well, we are about out of time. Where can people go, Jason Evert, to learn more about your books and The Chastity Project?

JASON EVERT: Yeah, we’ve got a website, Chastity.com, that’s got all the content there. YouTube is just YouTube then my name, /JasonEvert, same thing with Instagram, same thing with X, all that stuff. You can connect to our social media and at chastity.com

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. Jason Evert, with The Chastity Project. Thanks so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

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