The all-you-can-eat buffet is quintessentially American. We are a cafeteria society. You’ve heard the term “cafeteria Catholic.” It refers to someone who picks and chooses whatever he considers the more appealing parts of Catholic doctrine and leaves the rest. Think Joe Biden at the Vice-Presidential debate: he really goes for that “social teaching”, but he thinks of the pro-life stuff as totally optional and not really his thing.

We’re cafeteria everything! And not a Latin-American cafeteria, where you go through the line, pick your choice of meat, choice of starch, choice of vegetable, choice of dessert, and then pay for whatever you picked. We’re like my college dining hall. A hundred distinct food items sit up at the front of the room along with an endless supply of plates, and kids make three or four trips. You can put one slice of mushroom on a plate, and one piece of ravioli to try. Or why not take a full plate of the ravioli? If you don’t like it, you can throw it all away and go back for a hamburger instead. Actually, you can throw away the hamburger, too, when you realize that you’d rather just fill up on peach cobbler and ice cream. And when the dining hall management says they can meet the students’ demands for costly cage-free eggs only if they get rid of something else, there’s a huge uproar! We want the cage-free eggs AND the natural peanut butter AND the waffle bar AND the feta cheese AND the make-you-own-stir-fry with the array of twelve or so eastern spices!

(And we all complained about the crummy cafeteria food even though I really don’t know of any other college cafeterias that put out the likes of natural peanut butter and cage-free eggs and feta. Even the Commons at Yale University had fewer lunch meat and bread options in the sandwich line than my little college.)

But isn’t this our approach to everything? (Not to over-simplify. Ahem.) “I’m just attending this church until I find someplace I really like.” Or our involvement eyes are bigger than our involvement stomachs and we end up throwing away commitments left and right. Or we keep them and realize too late that we’ve made a whole meal out of fried things and dessert and we forgot to go get the entrée of a job or a marriage or a set of friends who are likely to be around for a few years. Friends come and go. Incredible relationships are almost assumed to be temporary. All the choice makes it hard to commit to a job, to a spouse, to a church. Instead we commit to para-church groups, we go on dates and dabble in mismatched relationships because it seems like there’s no downside to that, we do internships because we don’t want to get stuck someplace. We say to ourselves, “Oh, no, I’m not going to be in Cincinnati two years from now.” And we complain that we can’t find the perfect job, perfect church, perfect spouse.

What if we just don’t realize that the guy or gal we’re such great pals with is actually not available in those other cafeterias we are imagining, and we’ve got it pretty good as marriage set ups go? My friend’s job may not speak to his soul, but if he’s getting $40,000 a year when a lot of others are playing employment Frogger, maybe he shouldn’t be too anxious to empty that plate and start over. Maybe the kid who has collected five different campus ministries thinks it’s cool to have one group for the games, another for the discussions, another for the music. You don’t owe much to the sampler of cafeteria food. No one thing is responsible for sustaining you and there’s always more out there. But I saw a sign recently in a restaurant insisting that customers clean their plates. Maybe something is owed to the food after all? What if the others in each of those five Christian groups are trying to form communities and build strong relationships? Isn’t that kid’s dabbling actually taking something from the experience of the others in the groups?

Alright. All analogies are flawed. I like this one. Feel free to point out flaws, and maybe it can be refined! (Or, you know, dumped in the trash. Surely there’s a whole buffet full of analogies!)

“Love endures only when the lovers love many things together and not merely each other.” So says Walter Lippmann. “Love is not just looking at each other; it is looking in the same direction.” So says Antoine de Saint-Excupéry. In Eden, Adam is given Eve as a fitting helper. The first function of the relationship is partnership. Maybe God tells humanity generally to reproduce and manage the earth. But everything we’re told about individual relationships points to partnership. “It is not good for Man to be alone.” (Brigham Young agreed, saying that every unmarried man over the age of 26 is a menace to society.) Adam is delighted to see someone like himself.

With whom do you love “many things together”? Who seems to be “looking in the same direction” as you? It seems as though some of my unattached peers, especially those prone to over-thinking and intellectualizing and abstraction (I seem to know a lot of those!) don’t realize—or feel rather grudging—that those questions really articulate the whole project.

One friend of mine told me that her young man (at that time “just friends”) said to her, “We seem to think about things the same way.” Now, she’s a woman, so she knows what that means. There’s an “ought” attached to it. But he’s a man, so he knew her for years before they became a couple. They’re together now, and if you ask me, they probably already know almost as much as they need to. There are some really consistent indicators of couple potential. That line is one of them. Someone asked them about it—How long have you two known each other? And you’ve just started dating recently? “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it turns out this is way better.”

I understand that there is a cloudy barrier preventing people (mostly men?) from seeing what things are like on the other side of committing to someone like that, even someone who “thinks about things the same way.” I am sympathetic. I have a friend who keeps saying he thinks he’s really bad at envisioning what a job will be like before he takes it, whether he will like it, etc. That is exactly why society needs patterns, norms, and social pressures. People need to be pushed through that cloudy barrier, but these days there is nothing to push them. So they just sortof stand there, saying, “Well, I just don’t wanna; I just don’t know. What if there’s someone better?” When I was younger, and involved with someone who “thought about things the same way I did,” I stalled the same way, and there was nothing to give me a push beyond that cloud. Couldn’t I spend a little more time looking for younger or prettier? But young and pretty (for example) isn’t the point, of course. And it isn’t common to be “looking in the same direction.” And people waste a lot of time.