(Originally published by Mayday Magazine, November 2009)
After the month of October being largely devoted to selfishness and deceit (trick or treat!), it was a breath of fresh air for me to sit back and think about relationships. Almost everyone cherishes them, and longs for them. The kind of relationships that make you sit back and sigh, the kind of couples you can’t look at without feeling wistful warm fuzzies in your belly, the newlyweds with starry eyes and joined hips, the little old men and ladies with ten grandkids and locked lips. Relationships that make men stronger, women more beautiful, and create little pockets of the divine under shabbily shingled roofs, homes with something more lasting than death and stronger than financial strife. Relationships that stand strong when health fails and jobs vanish. Relationships that form pillars and shields around children who know that mommy and daddy will be home waiting for them with open arms and kind words, to teach them by example how to cherish and respect the world around them. Relationships that whisper to your soul, surely there is a God somewhere.
Positive, monogamous relationships are rare and sometimes even patronized with barely concealed bitterness by society. People are wrapped up in the Halloween mentality of disguise and gimme gimme gimme, always trying to be something they’re not so that somebody will feed their hungry hearts with emotional candy. And then, when the flavour wears off and the bowl is empty, tantrums are thrown, lines are drawn, relationships are abandoned.
“We just grew apart.”
“The spark isn’t there anymore.”
“Love shouldn’t be this difficult.”
Relationships don’t work anymore because we are selfish, deceptive, and emotional. Our era likes to tell us to follow our hearts, but the heart of man is deceitful above all things. Our hearts tell us to go around finding ourselves, living each moment to the fullest, getting the most out of life. Our hearts say, ‘if only’, and our hearts say, ‘I want’. On their own, our hearts are infantile. Mine mine mine, gimme gimme gimme. Trick or treat.
You’ll never experience true joy this way, or true love. Love is not selfish, love is patient, kind, and forgiving, and looks out for others above itself. And it is not emotional.
Love is to emotion as eating is to taste.
When you love in marriage, you are one body, one united soul. The feeding of a body keeps it alive, the way love keeps a relationship alive. The feeling involved is sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, but entirely secondary to the act itself.
What does this mean? It means that if you aren’t doing what is best for the other person whether it feels good to you or not, you don’t love them. You aren’t loving them, because love is an action. You aren’t feeding the relationship. If you aren’t forgiving them (choosing to forget their wrongdoing and release them from punishment) even if it doesn’t feel good to you, then you don’t love them. See, our follow-your-heart society has created the relationship equivalent of gum chewers out of us all. We don’t eat, we just clamp our jaws on this piece of tasty stuff and work it until the flavour is gone, and once it doesn’t do anything for us anymore we spit it out. That’s we how we treat each other, and we call it love.
Love isn’t gum. It’s not chewed up for the good flavours and then spat out, it is eaten on the basis of the fact that it’s good for the body, even if we’d rather have something sweeter. Because taste is secondary to eating. That’s how you get a healthy body. That’s how you get a healthy relationship. You love by action, doing what is best for the other person as if they are yourself, even if it doesn’t emotionally feel good to you at the time. And when this is your lifestyle, good feelings are a wonderful natural byproduct. The way a practiced chef can make a healthy meal delicious, a dedicated, selfless couple can create an emotionally satisfying relationship. But sometimes you’ve got to eat the brussel sprouts, and take your medicine, and nothing can make it taste better.
If you want to find love you’ve got to be real, and be selfless. ‘Gimme gimme’ is not a reliable moral compass and it’s not the way to happiness. Our hearts have been pushing us around for far too long. Would you ride a bicycle through a forest wearing a blindfold and not steering? Don’t follow your heart unless you know it is being led by something better and wiser than yourself. Until then, try leading it down the path of selfless love. What have you got to lose?
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