Knowing Love
My girlfriend is wondering if she is in love, and asked me this morning how we know when we love someone. I realized that my pre-midlife crisis has given me a slightly different (skewed?) view of love - perhaps one worth writing about for a few minutes today.As a teenager, love was a physical manifestation - all hormonal and googly-eyed, weepy poetry-laden, sunsets and pink flamingos kind of experience. It was possessive and needy, and selfish. It was shallow and superficial - and laced with care and concern, and elements of love. And boy did it hurt sometimes!
In college, I thought I sought an intellectual kind of love - all criteria-based, pragmatic, and rational. I sought out the smartest, most insanely intellectual and odd-ball men who could provide me with challenges and curiosities and novel experiences and conversation. Coupled with physical attraction, this was intoxicating. Feelings so powerful I felt overwhelmed - and when these relationships ended, I felt lost and empty. I had invested so much of myself and left so little room for my own self-development in being so smitten with my intellectual prince.
At 23, I married someone who was fun-loving and laid-back - the antithesis of myself. I convinced myself he was "good for me" and "complimented" me. In 9 years of marriage he held 10 jobs, and took us into thousands of dollars of debt between job-hopping and casino gambling. It was an adventure alright. But I got neither the passion of my youth, nor the intellectual stimulation of my college days. I honestly do not know exactly why we got married, other than the fact that we wanted to. But I stuck it out for a good long time.
I met my current (and last!) husband at a professional conference in 1997. I was just about to turn 26, and I was separated from my then-husband who had moved to FL to live with his sister. I was not looking for anything, but I made a good friend. I liked Michael a lot. He was certainly beautiful and intelligent, and kind - but he was also shy and reserved. And I was still married and not even aware of possibilities. It was when I became single some 5 years later that I even saw Michael as someone who could be more than a friend.
We had a conversation on the sofa on night on a long weekend visit during which we talked about whether we loved each other, or were "in love". We had opposite beliefs - I felt that being "in love" was the beginning, and loving each other was the next level. Michael saw it the opposite way - he said he loved me, but wondered if he was "in love" with me yet. It was semantics, really. We understood that there were stages to these things, and that we were in the midst of a shift. Certainly, the attraction was there. Certainly the intellectual conversations were there, too. And we enjoyed each other's company. But was this a relationship for the "long haul"?
We wanted to be sure that we had the kind of love Paul wrote about in his letter to the church at Corinth - that love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" - and "never fails". We had experienced failures of what we had thought was "love" and called "love" - so was it not love, then? We had also both thought we had been "in love" before. But how could we sort through the initial attraction, the overwhelming and powerful physical "chemistry" between us, and our own desires for a relationship?
We celebrate our 1-year wedding anniversary in a month. And I think we are still learning that we love each other. Love enabled us to be together. We each quit our jobs and moved to a new city we'd never lived in - in Kentucky of all places. I moved without even a prospect of a job, and worked only part-time for 5 months. We each left friends who had become like family. We each gave up freedoms we had grown accustomed to. We gave up our private space and quirky habits. Michael gave up piling laundry in hampers until it climbed up to the ceiling. He gave up working in the office until morning came. He gave up hours every night at the gym before heading back to work, regular basketball with the guys, and watching endless hours of ESPN and every game that came on TV. For us, in many ways, sacrifice = love.
So, how do I know I love my husband? When I have a bad day or a good day, he's the first I want to tell about it. When I wake up, I'm grateful he's there, and not in another state. It's a good feeling to come home at night to each other. When I think about growing old, I envision us on the porch swing together philosophizing about politics and religion, and music and technology. This time, my happiness is not based on him. Rather, he adds to my happiness. He is my partner and together we are building a life that we both want. We are learning that compromise is not a dirty word. We have been bearing a lot of each other's burdens, but God has been renewing us together to be able to do that. When we are more faithful to God, we are better partners to each other. God just allows us to be able to do it.
Now that I know I love my husband, and know more about why I love him, I am more "in love" with him. My love for him has less to do now with what he does for me, or how he make me feel - and more to do with who he is and the great gift God blessed me with. This year has been incredibly difficult - getting married, moving, changing jobs and careers, paying bills, setting up a joint household, navigating the daily stress of life together, and now struggling with minor health issues and those health concerns of our parents. And we have grown to love each other more, and thank God more. Each day we learn more about how to best love each other, and we are making many mistakes. But we are both enjoying love a lot more, and learning to be thankful for love that comes not through the physical, not through the intellectual - but through the Spiritual. When we pray together, I feel our love (and experience our love) for each other more than any other time. Our life together, through God (the author of love) = our love. Anything else just will wouldn't endure.
posted by No Longer In Crisis @ 2/21/2005 09:51:00 AM
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