The Only Way to Make Love Last

I once thought of James Ettison as a not-very-profound person, but it was ungenerous of me to think of him that way. James was a salesman, on the road a good deal, and I think I envied him a little when a gentle and lovely woman fell in love with him. Her name is Alice, and he was as sure as a human being could be about anything that she would bring him all of his deepest desires.

They got, and settled snugly, maybe smugly, into happiness. But about two years, on a cold November night before the snow had come, Alice car skidded on a stretch of ice that had formed unnoticed beneath a bridge on a two-way stretch of highway, and she ran head on, full speed, into the car coming from the other direction.

Alice survived. After tilting toward death for a year, she gave signs of living again, and she did. But she was never the same. She was all but paralyzed from the hips downward. Her memory was spotty and selective, and she uttered sounds that James had to learn to translate the way a person learns a new language. As months slithered into years, the past crept back with fits and starts into Alice's memory, which, in some ways, made life harder for her, because then she became that much more conscious of her other handicaps. She bore them like a smiling angel most of the time, but unpredictably, out of the blue, she sometimes, for weeks on end, was smothered by depression.

James quit his traveling job right after the accident, got some work near home, and made a nearly full-time vocation of taking care of Alice, once so wonderful. Nobody ever heard a discouraging word from his corner, and the man once a spiritual lightweight showed he was a world-class keeper of commitment.

Alice died fifteen years or so after that one terrible November night, and somebody asked James how he had done it all so patiently when he had gotten such a poor smidgen of everything he had hoped Alice would give to him. He said he had never thought to ask, though he had sometimes asked God why Alice was stuck with living and got nothing back from it.

But pressed a little, he said it: "I just loved her."

What wondrous love is this that stays when deepest desires go begging?

Then there is Emily and Jason. They had kept a passion stoked, but in bounds, for ten years when, out of nowhere, a virus nobody talks about invaded Jason's loins and knocked his sexual faculties out of connubial commission, rendered him unqualified for the higher registers of sexual love. A microscopic killer, deadly to sex, and no wonder drug to kill it. But Emily has lived with Jason now for fifteen years of noncoital marriage, and if you were to ask her how she manages, I know that she would tell you no more and no less than this "I Love him".

What wondrous love is this stays after the desires of love are denied?

A lot of our loving is a magnificent desire. Someone ignites desires in us and then holds out a promise that he or she can satisfy them. They are desires as deep and strong as we have ever felt. Or can feel. Desires for intimate communion, for being one with another person, totally one, spiritually, sexually one, so that the other can fill us and make us complete.

When a person becomes our hope for what we most wondrously desire, we are in love. And the love we are in is desiring love. It is one of God's better inventions. No one should go through life without it.

Desiring love is a fragile flame, burning bright for a springtime, maybe through summer. But then there is a love we call committed love. It is the love that stays alive through the longest winter.

Human love moves us in two directions, like two currents in a single river, each flowing on its own course.

One love is the current of desire; the other love is the current of commitment.

The current of desiring love is drawn toward a promise; it is drawn toward the person who promises to fulfill our deep desires. Nathaniel Branden, in his book "What Love Asks of Us", defines love as self-centered desire: " Love is the highest, the most intense expression of the....for me, 'good for me' beneficial to my life' human disposition.

The current of commitment moves from a promise; it is kept going by a promise to keep on loving when our loving is not satisfying our desires. Marie-Leon Ramlot, in the French Vocabulary of Biblical Theology, fixes on the less selfish way of promised love: "Promise is one of the key words of the language of love. To promise is to pledge one's power and one's faithfulness...the commitment of the heart and the generosity of faith."

Two currents. Two direction. Yet both are the currents of love.

Consider for the moment the moods of the first current, desiring love.

Love delights in her when she is near.

Love longs for her when she is gone.

Love hungers for the touch of her flesh.

Love thirsts for embrace in her spirit.

Love lives by hope that she will be all she promises to me.

Love dies when she will not be for me.

What I hoped that she would be.

The love of desire! What a gift it is.

Too bad it doesn't last. But it doesn't, not for most people, not after the blessed heat of it's early summer days. If someone should promise to desire you forever, don't stake your pension on it. Love born of desire is seldom forever.

The intimate companionship of committed love is what can last a lifetime.

But how do we love another person with a committed love? It is just raw moral fiber that holds us in a relationship no matter how badly it disappoints us? Sticking with what we are stuck with until a merciful death parts us: is this commitment love?

Yes, in a way, it can be something like a will to survive, sometimes, when life gets terribly tough, and one part of us wants to pack up and leave the scene.

Committed love is a will to give a chance at permanent tenure. But gutsy sticking is not what committed love is all about.

Commitments build the strong that hold up a partnership. But these strong outer walls are important only because an inner life of caring love can be nurtured inside them. The walls give care a structure for survival. Sticking it out provides a place for love to come home to after it has wandered a while. And maybe lost its way. But making it last is only a way of giving people a chance to make it good.

What, then, is there to committed love besides sticking to a relationship? What else does commitment do to keep love alive and well-or to heal it when it gets sick-or maybe to resurrect it when it has died?

Committed love is a paradoxical power. Paradoxical? Yes. Paradoxical, because it is power to surrender. A power to surrender? Yes, power, because sometimes it takes a lot of strength to surrender.

But everything depends on what you surrender.

Committed love

Is a power to surrender our right to get what we desire so that the person we love can get what he or she needs.

Let's slow down here and take the last sentence in bits. We surrender our right. Our right to what we desire. For the sake of the need the other person has. When my desire conflicts with your need, I will opt for your needs-if my love is committed love.

We are talking about a love that reaches out beyond our own wants into the other person's needs. Keeps reaching. Keeps trying to understand what the other's real needs are, keeps looking for them, asking about them, listening for the coded messages, waiting for the right time for plain words, staying there with her. Because I know that she, like me, has deep, deep needs that leave her poor of spirit if they are not met.

Committed love

Is for the winter of life's unfairness, when we feel drained of s dream that didn't come-true, for the wormwood season of our desire's disillusion. Careful now, we must not misunderstand the terms of surrender.

Committed Love

Is not the surrender of our needs for the sake of the other person's desires.

Committed Love

Does not turn us into stooges for another person's whims-obedient servants of his or her brutality-suckers of his or her betrayals. Nor is it a set-up for putdowns.

But sometimes when I surrender my right to have what I desire, I can feel as if I am surrendering one of my truest needs. I need help to see the real difference.

Do you really need a voluptous sex life or do you only want it badly? Do you really need somebody fascinating to talk to you every night or do you only want it badly? Do you really need a partner who makes you feel like a terrific human being or do you only want one?

Well, if not the Alleluia Chorus at every bedding down, at least Wine Kliene Nachtmusik for you now and then. And if not somebody who makes scintillating conversation every night before the burning heart, how about one who smiles your way over a TV dinner? And if not a partner who lifts your self-esteem a couple of notches at every breakfast, at least one who doesn't clobber your self-image in front of company. Not asking too much.

Desiring love does not always reach for the sky. It can make accomodations. Most of us settle for a decent earthly compromise, so long as our cup is at least half-full.

The question is, how can committed love keep flowing when the current of desiring love stops running our way? The answer is, by blending desire with care. Care comes quietly alive when the winds of desire hush, and I hear the whisper of need. But care has lyrics of its own.

Care is love's investment in another person's needs.

Care is love's flexibility to go where another needs to go.

Care is love's firmness to stay close by when the other cannot move.

Care is love's generosity to give when the other speaks of needs.

Care is love's presence when being there matters most.

Care is love's power to survive the death of desire.

The miracle of care is that when I have gotten over my unfilled desires, I discover that taking care is gratifying, in a very different way, but just as gratifying in its way as expected pleasure is. Not as exciting, not as erotic, not as crazy making either, but in its own way more fulfilling over the long haul. Her needs become my desires. This is what loving care, caring love, is about.

Caring Love

Is more than doing things for someone. Care is also respect that holds back and let's another be.

Caring Love

Respects her right to be her very real self, unshadowed by me, in the light of the sun that shines equally bright on us both. It knows that she has a valid claim to be left alone to be who and what she is. It respects her inalienable right to be treated with honor and reverence even when desiring love for her is dead or dying.

Any thought?

Let's have a coffee

Hari

Enjoy reading...Blessing