Article: What Is Love

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Article: What Is Love
Wed, 06-25-2008 - 3:53pm
THE DAD ZONE : What we mean when we talk about love

STEPHEN CALDWELL


Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006


URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Family/169375/




Humans began abusing the word “love” long before the Jutes, Angles and Saxons fi rst started mixing their mumblings some 1, 500 years ago for the beginnings of the English language.


But Americans have done “love” few favors in the last century or two.


We use love to describe how we feel about coffee or a good steak.


We use love to describe the way we feel sexually toward another person.


We use love to describe how we feel about our children.


We use love to describe how we feel about a spouse.


We use love to describe how we feel about God or how God feels about us.


Now, I ask: Are they all the same ?


Of course not.


Some differences are stark, some subtle.


We’d like to think our love for a spouse is like God’s love for us — everlasting and sacrificial. Yet the divorce rate indicates how many people were deceived by something they thought was love or by someone who abused their love or who never really married for love in the first place. They married for money or passion or companionship or duty or... whatever.


My wife and I married as teenagers, and I can’t say for sure that we really knew the depths of the meaning of love. I can only say God saved us from ourselves along the way, allowed us to discover an abiding love before it was too late and jolts us back on the road when we drift toward the ditches.


I hope we don’t dismiss the romance of love or give too much importance to duty, but we understand, I think, that like justice needs grace and grace needs justice, love at times needs romance and duty in ways that are nearly impossible to explain.


I often wonder how many couples “in love” would still agree to marriage if told that over the next 40 or 50 years they’d have to “love” their spouse through a drug addiction or a mental illness or a medical problem that makes sex impossible or bankruptcy or boredom or....


I wish such things on no one, but I wonder.


Yet, such love is out there.


In the book Why I Love These People, Po Bronson tells the story of a man who had twice fled long-term relationships for the “love” of another woman and now was telling his wife he wanted to divorce. But this time the woman loved him in a way he didn’t understand.


“I’m not going to let you do this to yourself,” she told him, tears in her eyes and her fists pounding his chest.


She refused to give up on him. She knew his mother had “left him” when she was killed and his father had “left him” by refusing to rear him and his grandfather (who reared him ) had “left him” when he committed suicide.


“So I am not going to leave you,” she said. “You can’t push me away. You can’t make me quit.” She demanded they go to counseling instead of lawyers, “because I know you, and if you do this, you’re as good as dead.”


She didn’t know if they could save the marriage, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was helping the man she loved save himself.


“It was so selfless,” he later said. “Her reaction really blew me away. I had never been loved like that before.... It was an altogether different kind of love than I was familiar with. Sincere, and giving.... I had never actually loved anyone before. I thought I had, but my love was always selfish. It was always about me, about the feelings I was getting from the relationship.”


Just in time, he found real love, because real love had found him. Stephen Caldwell is the city editor of the Northwest Arkansas edition. He and his wife live in Fayetteville and have four children and two dogs. Email him at:


scaldwell@arkansasonline. com


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