Aging Capriciously

Years ago, I wrote a blog titled “But Can We Really Learn to Love Again?”  It was inspired by Pink’s song “Just Give Me a Reason.”  Pink raised the hopeful possibility that two people whose love had gone cold might somehow rekindle what they once had.

At the time, I asked: Can we really learn to love again?

Today I find myself wondering if I was asking the wrong question.

Perhaps there is another question that must come first:

Why is love so frail?

How can something that seems so powerful, so permanent and so overwhelming disappear?  How can two people who once could not imagine living without each other reach the point where they can barely stand being in the same room?  How can love become hate?  And perhaps even more puzzling, how can love become nothing more than indifference?

The Promise of Forever

We swear our love will outlive time,
Beyond the years, beyond the grave;
Yet vows proclaimed as though divine
May prove too fragile still to save.
Eternity is easily promised.

We humans are rather fond of the word forever.

We promise to love forever.  We promise to remain faithful forever.  At weddings, people stand before family, friends and sometimes God and promise to remain together until death departs them.

And I think most of them really mean it.

That is what makes the frailty of love so perplexing.  Most people exchanging wedding vows are not lying.  At that particular moment, forever seems entirely possible.

I wrote in my earlier blog about the kind of love in which no reason, logic, facts, data, statistics or arguments could convince us that we would not remain with that person until the end of time.

Whenever one of my students in college would tell me that they were getting married, I would somewhat facetiously ask them “Have you written your prenuptials yet?  They would look at me like I was crazy.  Some would even say “No, we don’t need them.  Our love will never die.”

But then something happens.

Maybe there is an affair.  Maybe there is a betrayal.  Maybe someone drinks too much.  Maybe money becomes a source of endless conflict.  Maybe there is cruelty or neglect.

But perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all.

Perhaps two people simply begin drifting apart.

And one day forever becomes yesterday.

Before the Rose Loses Its Bloom

A rose is placed in a lover’s hand,
Its crimson bloom a pledge to stay;
But hearts, like roses, understand
How quickly beauty fades away.
Some promises die before the petals.

There is something ironic about giving roses as a symbol of love.

We choose something beautiful to represent something we hope will last forever—and the beautiful thing we choose begins dying almost as soon as we give it away.

Maybe that is precisely why the rose is such an appropriate symbol of romantic love.

Love can be astonishingly transient.

People who once spent hours talking to each other eventually have nothing to say.  People who could not keep their hands off one another stop touching.  The person whose telephone call once caused your heart to race eventually becomes the person whose call you don’t want to answer.

How does that happen?

In my earlier essay I wrote about caring becoming neglect, closeness becoming distance and love becoming apathy.

But those words describe what happened.  They don’t explain why it happened.

Perhaps that is the mystery.

There may be no single moment when love disappears. There may be a thousand tiny moments instead.

The kiss we forgot to give.

The conversation we were too busy to have.

The apology we refused to make.

The resentment we decided to keep.

The affection we stopped showing because we assumed the other person already knew.

Maybe love doesn’t always die from a mortal wound.

Sometimes it dies from a thousand paper cuts.

When the Fire Goes Out

The lips that whispered, “You are mine,”
May someday speak another name;
The eyes that once with passion shined
May look at us and feel no flame.
Love seldom tells us when it leaves.

One of the most haunting thoughts in my earlier blog was this:

What happens when we forget that we once loved someone?

I wrote about telling someone “I love you” countless times and meaning it every time—and then eventually reaching a day when I stopped saying it.  Eventually even the memory of that once overwhelming love could become distant.

I still find that idea disturbing.  Like you, I was told that “Love springs eternal from the human breast.”

How can a person who once occupied so much of our emotional universe become almost irrelevant to us?

We remember where we went on vacation.  We remember the house where we lived.  We remember the restaurant where we celebrated an anniversary.  We may even remember what the other person wore on our first date.

But somehow we can forget the feeling.

The memories remain while the love disappears.

Perhaps love does not announce its departure.  There is no alarm bell.  No flashing red light.  No announcement that says:

WARNING: LOVE IS LEAVING.

We simply wake up one day and realize something that once seemed permanent is no longer there.  I walked out of my first marriage on New Years day after sixteen years of marriage.  I finally admitted that the love was no longer there.

Is Hate Really the Opposite of Love?

And stranger still, the heart can turn—
From tenderness to cold disdain;
Where once desire was fierce enough to burn,
Indifference may alone remain.
The opposite of love may not be hate.

We often say that hate is the opposite of love.

I am not so sure.

Hatred still requires something from us.  We think about the person.  We resent them.  We replay old arguments.  We remember injuries.  We become angry when we hear their name.

There is still an emotional connection.

Apathy may be far more final.  No love.  No hate.  Just no care.

Perhaps love truly dies when we simply don’t care anymore.

I don’t love you.

I don’t hate you.

I don’t miss you.

I don’t wonder where you are.

I don’t particularly care whether I ever see you again.

How does someone go from being the most important person in our world to being someone about whom we feel almost nothing?

I don’t know.

And perhaps that inability to explain it tells us something important about love itself.

Perhaps Love Isn’t Something We Have

Perhaps we ask of love too much:
To conquer time and never bend,
When love depends on human touch
And mortal hearts that change and end.
Love may promise forever; we cannot.

At the end of my earlier essay, I compared relationships to the concept of entropy.  Unless energy continues to be put into a system, disorder increases.

Maybe relationships aren’t very different.

We talk about love as though it were something we acquire.

I found love.

I have someone who loves me.

We fell in love.

It was love at first sight

Perhaps therein lies the problem.

Maybe love isn’t something we have.

Maybe love is something we do.

Romance may start the process.  Attraction may bring two people together.  Passion may make us believe that we have discovered the one person in the universe without whom life would be impossible.

But those feelings cannot do all the work forever.

Love may eventually require patience when passion has faded.  Conversation when silence would be easier.  Forgiveness when resentment would feel better.  Attention when we are busy.  Affection when familiarity has replaced excitement.

Perhaps love survives because two people continue putting energy into it.  If life ends without energy, why should love be any different?

Years ago, I asked whether we can learn to love again.

I still don’t know the answer.  I found thirty reasons why my first marriage failed before I stopped counting.

But today I find myself asking an even more troubling question:

Why should we have to learn to love again in the first place?

Perhaps love itself isn’t frail.

Perhaps we are.

We change.  We become distracted.  We become selfish.  We become bored.  We get hurt.  We accumulate grievances.  We forget why this person once mattered so much to us. We cannot forgive or we do not forget.

And perhaps the greatest mistake we make is believing that because love was alive yesterday, it will automatically be alive tomorrow.

A rose does not remain a rose because someone once watered it.

Neither does love.