Coldplay front man Chris Martin says this on his “conscious uncoupling” (also known to mere mortals as divorce) from Gwyneth Paltrow:

This was more a realization about trying to grow up basically… if you can’t open yourself up, you can’t appreciate the wonder inside. So you can be with someone very wonderful, but because of your own issues you cannot let that be celebrated in the right way. What changed for me was, I don’t want to go through life being scared of it, being scared of love, being scared of rejection, being scared of failure… About two years ago I was a mess really because I can’t enjoy the thing that we are good at and I can’t enjoy the great things around me because I’m burdened by this–I’ve got to not blame anyone else and make some changes. Up to a certain point in my life I wasn’t completely vulnerable and it caused some problems. If you don’t let love really in then you can’t really give it back.  

Huh? What is he, a 16-year-old girl, watching Oprah reruns and reading Eat, Pray, Love? 

It seems unlikely that what his kids most want and need from him is that he be able to appreciate the wonder inside himself. 

I hope that Martin can one day soon appreciate the poop that’s actually inside us (pun intended). Realizing that, realizing that we are all depraved, might be the first step toward recognizing the universal need for Christ who embodied real love. Christ who died for his bride, the church, who endured the worst trials for his bride (note the complementarity of marriage: marriage partners are by nature fundamentally different), expects that once married, husbands and wives stay married, which requires the sacrifice of personal desires. True marital love, the kind that dies to self, is what our kids need and want, and it is wholly distinct from the contemporary narcissistic perversion of love characterized by self-absorption and self-wonder.