Keeping Love Strong Isn’t Easy
The cost of loving is steep and the view from the precipice is daunting.
My sister, married nearly 25 years, calls to say that she’s getting a divorce. It’s the best choice, really. The best, and now the only choice. I look at her beaming girl face in the wedding pictures and see no shadow of this ending. Hers seemed a dream secured. At 45, she wakes alone, startled and gasping for breath.
A friend, a former priest, calls to say that he’s getting married. A palpable, unmitigated joy spills out in his words. “I can tell her anything,” he says. “And she gets all my jokes.” For years he has longed for and run from the longing of finding someone who “gets it”; the beautiful mystery of his heart. At 47, he has found her.
Another friend calls to say he’s fallen in love with a goddess. My friend is younger, and he talks that way. Full-tilt, all-or-nothing passion. He’s getting engaged, he’s almost sure, sometime soon. She is, after all, a goddess and kind besides.
But when he talks of seeing his old girlfriend, the one he loved and who loved him back but never at the same time, his voice cracks with tears. He wonders how he can love the goddess and still long for the girlfriend. I’m older and wonder how he cannot.
There are others, the rest of us, living some phase of love, old or new. We all hope and fear and wonder how to make it last. And there are critical junctures where we move closer or further apart.
At the time, the choices can seem inconsequential; a petty grievance tightly held, a bending, ever so slight, to dismiss whatever the other says as old news.
Things that can sometimes only be seen from hindsight as the moment we set our love, like a stubborn, misshapen house plant, out to blister in the noonday sun.
“We stopped talking,” my sister says. And listening, too.
“I want to know everything about you,” says new love. And we want to tell it all. Our stories pour out of us like grateful tears. Someone is listening with love to the life we have waited to tell all our years. Someone is seeing us, in the kindest light possible, for the first time.
The magic of uncharted love is seeing and being seen with new eyes. We fall in love not only with this wonderful other, but with their vision of us. We are reborn, recreated in the other’s eyes. Anything, it seems, is possible.
And for a while, it is.
But eventually, because we tend to no longer see the things that are familiar to us, we stop looking. We stop talking. We stop listening. We finish each other’s stories, racing to get to the now beleaguered ending. We say we know the stories by heart, when what we mean is that we know them by rote. Our beloved has sprouted nose hairs and contradictions. Our hearts, by degrees, close.
Or not. Because it is a choice. It may not feel like it when the same ancient argument oozes out again over the kitchen table, or when we are bone-tired of trying, or when we or the other is as unreachable as hope.
It’s still a choice; living with our partners or living against them.
Lasting love isn’t measured in years. Some, with only a handful of time, share lifetimes. Others stick it out, together by default, but have nothing to say to each other. They keep punching the time card, but never show up for work. And part of love, especially old love, is work.
The other part is remembering how to play. Both activities require talking, listening and seeing. It is a subtle turning toward hope, a gentle hand that brings the scorched house plant in from the porch and nestles it in deeper soil. Old love, seeing with new eyes, looks across a great divide and finds a way to cross it.
I congratulate my friend, the former priest, on his engagement. I console my sister with the truth that 25 years is still a good run. I comfort my young friend with the knowledge that it’s possible to love two people and choose only one.
And I remind myself, in a time when it’s easy to forget, of the sacred, steep privilege of loving.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review