I was having a conversation the other day with a friend online and we were discussing love and how it changes. My friend took the position that love changes with time. He looked back over his relationship with his son and compared the love he felt when his son was young to the love he felt toward his son as an adult. Having grown children myself, I understood perfectly what he meant but I just wasn’t quite sure if it was the love that had changed. Does love really change or is it that we express and feel love differently as relationships grow and change? The latter is the position I’d be most eager to take because instinctually I want to take the position that love is a constant and that love itself does not change simply because a relationship matures or evolves. That is what I want to believe but I also feel strongly that beliefs should be examined and I shouldn’t just steadfastly cling to what I want to believe or, worse, what someone else told me to believe.
I read a meme once that said “Either I’ll love you forever or I never did.” And this is one of the truest things I’ve read in cartoon box on the internet. I can examine all of my past relationships and see clearly that those who I’ve truly loved, who I still love and who I always will love even if we divided or became embittered to one another. And when I look back at relationships where I “fell out of love” and subsequently became completely apathetic, I realized that for one emotional reason or another, the love was not real. I may have desired to love them, even convinced myself of it, but where the rubber meets the road, I just didn’t. I believe that love doesn’t die and I have 49+ years of living and loving to keep that as a core belief. And Since I believe that love doesn’t die, it is easy to want to believe that love does not change. Because if love has any capacity to change at all, then wouldn’t there also be the capacity for it to die? So you see, it’s hard to hold those two beliefs at the same time. Ultimately, I told my friend I’d have to roll this around in my head for a while and decide, firstly whether or not I agree with him and secondly, why or why not.
What is love? We all instinctually know what it is—and we certainly know when we feel it, but assigning words to it and depositing it in a tidy little box that we can define and universally accept…well that’s trickier. Talented philosophers have been trying for ages. But we can, at least, clean up our definition a little by eliminating some of the false loves we claim. We may claim to love Snickers bars or Shakespeare or sunny beaches or Dodge Vipers, anything that we “enjoy” we claim to “love”…but we all know that’s not what I’m talking about. For this exercise we’re going to just talk about love as it applies to bonded relationships. The love we have for our children, families, friends, and pets. Of course, love is far more comprehensive than that but I have to set a few limits to start off just to keep the smoke from billowing from my ears.
What I think, is that we mistake love for an emotion…and that’s the rub. Emotions are fleeting, they are what we feel in a moment or a group of moments but always the emotions of an instance will move aside and make way for new ones as our experience is fluid and changes. An emotion may be the anger we feel when we’re stuck in traffic. But when the traffic passes the anger melts away and we suddenly feel uplifted when our favorite song comes on the radio. An emotion is feeling rejected when we’re passed over for a promotion at work but that too passes when we find ourselves feeling appreciated in the art class we take at the recreation center. And so on and so on. “This too shall pass.” A favorite quote of mine that has quietly guided me through many hard times. And the phrase “this too shall pass,” applies to emotions perfectly. Emotions are momentary. Love is not.
Therefore, I cannot believe that love is an emotion. I believe that love is a bond we forge and within that bond is contained all emotions. Within love is joy and pain, anger and grief and obligation, kindness and suffering and sacrifice. Within love is exaltation and defeat, jealousy and comradery; protection and vulnerability; pride and frustration. Love is a bond that contains all. That bond is unbreakable. It will withstand distance, heartache and death.
So do I believe love can change? No, I don’t.
I have two grown children and I remember distinctly where I was when I felt each of them flutter inside me for the first time. That was when my bond with them first formed…when they were real to me in a new way and not just an abstraction brought on by a little plus sign on a pee-stick. That was when I started loving them. When my sons were born, I was blown away by how smitten I was with them. All the little yawns and nose wiggles were mesmerizing. They were a perfect embodiment of love and I just freaking adored them. And I believe this is a pretty universal reaction to new parenthood. Now my children are adults and I feel I love them just as fiercely…although their nose wiggles are not nearly so entrancing now that they’re in their twenties and thirties. That initial “infant-smitteness” has left but I feel joy knowing them and learning about them and from them every day. And in the last 30 years, in sharing our journeys, I have experienced every emotion along the way (sometimes at tedium). But that bond of love is strong enough to contain them all and has been since those very first flutters.
So, for my friend Ron, I will have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. I believe perhaps you compare those emotions you felt when your son was young to the emotions you felt when he was grown. But those emotions are fleeting and fluid, though often revolving and repeating. Love is the vessel that carries them all. Love is your bond. Love is your constant. That is what I believe anyway.
And Ron, it’s now been years since we spoke and since I originally wrote this piece…and I know you were sick in 2015. Sometimes that is the way with online friends, that they just drift apart and don’t speak anymore. But I feel in my heart that you have moved on from this realm to the next but I want to thank you for making me think…especially making me think about something as important as love.
I love you, buddy.
Maxie
Originally written October 12, 2015, Revised January 4, 2020
“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.” – Woody Allen