Measures of Love

Posted on June 10, 2007 in Partnership

Do you avoid talking about it lest you become as a pharisee standing in the temple letting all the world know that he is a great lover of God or do you pull away the bushel basket? In this and in similar matters, it is hard to decide.

Our society wants to package everything. Divide it up, measure it, put it in a package for consumption by other people. Everything must be tested, checked, put on the block to be oggled by others to verify its veracity, purity, and common sense. Emotion’s just a product and you must submit it to a secret bureaucracy that emits public results. It’s not just “tell us how you feel”, it’s “tell us how much you feel”. And we end up shivering in the cold sunlight, worrying about claim to humanity.

The title of James’ answer to this week’s Philosophical Friday question and the question itself goaded me into this tirade. One thing about the blogging world that I have come to dislike is this use of it as a proving ground for emotion. You don’t describe your happiness, you defend it. Love — that ineffable blossom falling from a cherry tree — means nothing if it does not go clang on the scale of obviousness. You have to show it to others these days like a bad porno flick run over and over again. Or so the writers of such questions would have us believe.

In my nineteenth year of marriage and fidelity, I satisfy myself and my wife with a single fact: I am here, day after day, as surely as the atmosphere. You do not need great acts to prove your love because for most of us these are not asked of us. “What if” replaces “what is”. And What Is is a matter between only my wife and me as it should be.

Sometimes I brag about my many years, but then I realize that those many years are their own fact and do not need my embellishment. That Lynn and I see is enough. Keep it succinct, mind our business as something more than the kitsch of a diamond ring in every nuptial. It’s not the symbols or the wild acts, but the living together in patience and respect — and living together when the patience wears thin and the respect becomes tarnished in the hope that they will rebalance themselves if you just stop worrying and return to the friendship.

People can love at great distances or skin to skin. Love is not a pile of sugar cubes or a heap of meringues. Just live it. Just love.

[tags]love, partnership[/tags]

And shut up about it. (Especially you, Joel.)