Love

Love means trying. I believe most people buy into the myth propagated by the film industry and romance that love is free; it comes without thought or effort. We meet a beautiful person and “fall in love.”  The two then ride on the steed into the sunset. It is moving vision but one steeped in non-reality.

Closer to the truth is that boy meets girl, falls in lust, generally assumed to be love, and they beget children. She wakes up one morning to find that he is a monster and he loses the sense of thrill that he once knew. Troubles begin because initial expectations were too many, too high. Real love is not like that.

Love means continually trying.

Love means waking up with the baby at midnight.   It means listening to the screams of labor pains and weeping at the sight of a newborn miracle.  It is handholding when friends disappear (they cannot be there all the time). It is enduring the great fights of intimacy and withdrawal.  And surviving.

Creation of love is realized after laughing hysterically until tears roll down the cheeks and crying until the heart nearly splits causing  pain. Nobody hurts us like the people who love us. No one could. By definition, the people who love us most hurt us the most. After all, if an unknown insult us that is hurtful, but when our love is in jeopardy or so many causes of pain that cuts down to the marrow.

Love must be worked on. From the little I know, and less understand, of the business world to make money one needs to invest great amounts of energy. We put ourselves into our work to become successful. If that is true to make a buck, doesn’t it make even more sense to work hard at a love that will comfort us when we are bleeding?  No friend will stand by us like they will. Lose the soul mate and a lot more is been jettisoned than any ephemeral profit margin.

I am truly amazed that so many people expect so much from love, free. It is not free.  For the sake of love we must give more than we get.

If after a hard day, I come home angry and brooding I expect my counterpart to be there with a comforting word and soothing touch. I want her to act the part of my mother easing the furrows from my brow. But who is to say that she has not had a more difficult day than me? That is an unknown.   

Are you such a thing as bliss. Eden really exists. But it is only located after much work. I’ve seen many couples well into the senior years still in love. And I ask them, “What is your secret?”  They answer, a willingness to contribute daily to the basket of love. Here is a blessing I give to all the couples I marry, “Grow old together.”  That means giving every day, every moment.