Without love there is no flavor or meaning. Give into it and accept it with an open heart and you both will thrive.
—
Love is on my mind these days and I bet on yours as well. We all seem to be looking for it, or if we think we “found it of fell in it,” we are all hard at work to sustain it and keep it alive, fresh and passionate. Our preoccupation with love is not without scientifically proven merits and real life individual and social benefits. It turns out that love is as critical to meaningful human life and happiness as all the other basic necessities like food, shelter and security combined. You’ll be happy to know that we live much happier, longer and more fulfilled lives when love is a part of it.
Unfortunately, the reverse is just as true and even more powerful. Lack of love can lead to mental illness, failure to thrive and even death, especially in babies. A 2010 article by Naia Szalavitz explains how “Baby orphanages are harmful and there is no legitimate justification for their continued existence.” These conclusions that humans need love and loving touch to thrive and survive was confirmed numerous times in scientific studies and observations and indicates that lack of touch and affection can actually result in death in babies.
Now that we all feel good about ourselves, since we all had happy loving childhoods and made it to adulthood with minimal scars and damage, the bad news. As adults and for our entire lives, we need love, affection and touch just as much as babies do. Yes love is critical to a healthy life.
Of course there are many kinds of love both physical and emotional (parent child, siblings, family, friends, group, caregiver…) but the love I am exploring here is that elusive thing between lovers. That deep ocean of feelings (unlike any other) between two people who “fall in love” and proceed to spend years enriching each other, supporting each other, being each others safe harbor and soft place to fall and most importantly, bringing each other physical, emotional, psychological and sexual pleasure and satisfaction (having and raising children together is an added important bonus but is altogether another kind of love).
So, if love is so important, healthy and beneficial (not to mention delightful and orgasmic) why are so many of us struggling and failing to find and sustain it, left to exist without it?
Exploring love, from passionate and lasting to tragic and destructive, has been a favorite subject of books (too many to list here) and movies. A few favorites to help illustrate the answer:
Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1942) both with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn; Now Voyager (1942) with Bette Davis and Claude Rains; Casablanca (1942) with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (boy 1942 was a good year for movies!); The Age of Innocence (1993) with Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer; Before Sunrise / Before Sunset/ Before Midnight (1995, 2004, 2013) with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke; Brokeback Mountain (2005) with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal;The Long Hot Summer (1958) with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; An Affair to Remember (1957) with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr; Love Story (1970) with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw; Say Anything… (1989) with john Cusack and Ione Skye; The Way We Were (1973) with Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand; Sense and Sensibility (1995) with Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant and Pride and Prejudice (2005) with Keira Nightley and Mattew Macfadyen (I like these versions but any version of these or any of Jane Austin’s books are delightful).
I have been blessed with love a couple of times so far, the common denominator being ease of just being with her, loving her, connecting with her and feeling content, stimulated, energized, satisfied and happy. Love is a mutual state and both should respect, cherish, devour and treat each other with tenderness and humor and always remember the golden rule; we all need much more silliness in our lives. Bottom line, it was not hard and it was not work.
Although my loves didn’t last, they were glori0ius while they did and I am hopeful a third is just around the corner. We live much longer than we used to and several great loves in a lifetime are possible if not necessary. The obvious secret is to give into it, not to take yourself and your partner too seriously, and to treat each other as the most important person in your life, cause you are!
Another way of expressing what I learned on my exploration of love was beautifully expressed by these talented people:
1. The practical genius of Stephan Stills (borrowed with permission from Billy Preston):
“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”
2. Comforting parting though for us all from the movie Love Actually written by Richard Curtis and delivered with perfection by Hugh Grant:
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrival gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion…love actually is all around.”
3. Immortal and powerful words written by John Lennon, credited to Lennon-McCartney and performed by the Beatles:
LOVE is all there is and what makes life worth living ,as well as such a satisfying and rewarding journey. And the best thing about love is that there is always more to give, and the more you give the more there is and the more you receive.
Main Photo: Jackie /Flicker
Second Photo: Karen Kirchner /Flicker
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Thanks for your comment. We don’t disagree as much as you might think. Keeping love as your guide and blueprint vs. work changes how you perceive and react to the humanity and actions/omissions of your partner. It’s how you approach life that makes the difference. Accepting that love = work, turns everything into a transaction and negotiation and while there is room for that in any relationship, if your starting and ending point is loving and caring for the other and making sure they are happy, and it’s mutual, you have a recipe for lasting happiness. It’s a question of… Read more »
I would respectfully disagree. While yes there needs to be something about love that is refreshing and wonderful there will be times when loving someone is hard. I love my wife dearly, and she me, but we both know enough about our own faults to realize we are hard to love. I can be stubborn(among other things), her too, and in those moments choosing to love is what matters. It is not a reliance on a surge of emotions, because there will be times when emotions are not enough or drift away for a season. By being committed and knowing… Read more »