Love’s complexities endure—and love does, too
One of Plato’s best-known dialogues is The Symposium, a dinnertime conversation about love. In honor of Valentine’s Day, today we continue the conversation with some modern reflections on the topic.
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What I learned about love from reading The New York Times wedding announcements
On and off for forty years I have been reading wedding announcements in the New York Times. I started reading them in high school when I discovered Sunday papers, wondering who these people were and what my world had to do with their imaginary one, their private schools and their string of last-name first names lined up like polo ponies. I kept reading them when David Brooks noticed the announcements’ transformation: WASPy social register became meritocracy’s matchmaker, tabulating advanced degrees and brides who retained their names professionally. I kept reading them when weddings got gigantic in the 1990s and when they got weird in this century, suddenly the sort of event to be held at a zoo.
The Times now prints fewer announcements and the genre has changed, from résumé to rom-com short story. With exceptions, the way one gets one’s announcement in the Times is no longer by parental pedigree but narrative appeal, variations on a culturally approved meet-cute. For that reason, I save these newspaper announcements to use as artifacts in classes I teach—and not because I am a hoarder, as students sometimes fear.
These couples are not representative. Still, they model ways people with cultural capital now think about love. Expectations remain high for blending friendship, resources, and sex, though some combinations tempt disaster. From reading Times weddings announcements, I have learned this about love in our time:
1. Couples marry not to find a soulmate but one who likes them for the reasons they want to be liked and can help them enlarge those attributes. (He helps me achieve my goals; she loves my quirky side.)
2. Couples marry not to start an adventure or take up residence together but to signal another stage of their mutual enjoyment. (After sharing an apartment for ten years, I knew he was my forever person.)
3. Couples may simultaneously prize nuptial traditions and want to blow them up (two brides, wearing Handmaids’ Tale-ish red capes) or prize blown-up versions of traditions (costumed “prince” staging a proposal kissing Sleeping-Beauty-costumed woman to wake and wed).
4. Couples expect guests to assent to the couple’s definition of what their marriage means (we do what feels right to us), and if possible, to bless it with some sacrality (officiant is best friend ordained as Universal Life Minister).
As these patterns exhibit, priority on self-fulfillment gets fastened inside some fairly conventional love stories, even if that contradiction escapes the couples’ (or editorial) notice. The bad news about these stories is the way they frontload individual satisfaction, a risky bet to secure one’s happy-ever-afters.
The good news is that people still reach for a love story at all.
Agnes R. Howard teaches in Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University, and is author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human. She is a Contributing Editor for Current.
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You can’t deconstruct love
I once watched a documentary in which someone followed Jacques Derrida around, bombarding him with questions. The philosopher was an indulgent interviewee. One of my favorite moments, however, is when he snaps.
The filmmaker says, “Love has been a major theme in philosophy. What are your thoughts on love?” Derrida had been walking ahead, but he turns around to rant: “You can’t just ask it like that. What are your thoughts on love? I have no general thoughts on love.” “You go, Jack!” I thought. Love is bashful. It is not to be gawked at brazenly.
Bing Crosby was America’s most popular singer for decades. A secret to his success was his willingness to record all manner of music: jazz, blues, sacred, country, western, patriotic, Irish, and Hawaiian. There was one kind of song, however, that he did not want to sing. He told his agent not to ask him to do a song that brashly proclaimed, for everyone to hear, “I love you.”
The crooner’s instinct was right. The best love songs allow us only to glance discreetly at love. A classic example is “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” (1936). Rodgers and Hammerstein perfected the art with songs such as “People Will Say We’re in Love” and “If I Loved You.”
My favorite scene in the documentary is when Derrida has breakfast with his wife, Marguerite. They are just two, old people who found love in their twenties, married, had three children, and were staying together till death do them part. The interview asks numerous questions about deconstruction but shows no curiosity at all about how these two people had constructed a love that would last. Still, we were able slyly to sneak a peek as they buttered their toast.
Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College and is an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Twelve Classic Christmas Stories: A Feast of Yuletide Times, John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life, and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas.
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The dirty work of love
Valentine’s Day is a day of schlocky cards, chocolates, flowers, and all the goo-goo eyed paraphernalia of puppy love. Even—or especially—the oldsters need reminding now and then of the thrill of young love.
C.S. Lewis, drawing from Denis de Rougemont, reminds us in The Four Loves that “Love begins to be a demon the moment it begins to be a god.” Romantic love is a good thing. But it is not the best thing.
In his Love in the Western World, de Rougemont cautions against expecting too much of romantic love. No human can satisfy all my needs, can be a true ideal. “For this would be a deceit,” says de Rougemont, “and nothing enduring can be founded on a deceit. Nobody in the world can gratify me; no sooner were I gratified than I would change!”
Instead, advises de Rougemont, to choose someone for a spouse is to say, “I want to live with you just as you are,” which really means “It is you I choose to share my life with me, and that is the only evidence that there can be that I love you” (emphasis in original). Many young people will be disappointed by this seemingly prosaic view of love. But, says de Rougemont, such folk “must have had little experience of solitariness and dread, little experience indeed of solitary dread.”
Love and marriage, like war, are mostly dull routine punctuated by moments of great excitement. Love is steady and faithful more often than a divine transport. Theologians will remind us that love is an act of the will, not an emotion. Your love for a spouse shines brightest when changing a dirty diaper at 2 a.m., running an errand when your spouse is just too darn tired, doing the dishes for the two-hundredth night in a row without complaining. Enjoy your candy and romantic dinner today. And then get back to the work of loving each other.
Jon D. Schaff of Professor of Political Science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He’s the author of Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy and co-author of Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Film and Literature.
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Love’s full (gas) tank
A dozen years ago, an elderly member died at the church where my husband grew up. As his widow struggled to adjust in the months after, friends were stunned to discover that she did not know how to pump gas at the gas station. The reason, it turned out, was love. Throughout her half-century-long marriage, her husband had always filled the gas tank in her car, lovingly taking care of her with this simple gesture.
I am reminded of this story on a regular basis, whenever gas in my own car is getting low. You see, unless I am traveling on my own on an out-of-town trip, I never have to pump gas either. My husband usually monitors my car and fills up as needed.
Love, we’ve been conditioned by literature and movies to expect, makes people do extraordinary, outlandish things. To be sure, that it does. But sometimes, more importantly, it leads people to do remarkably ordinary chores and tasks—filling up the gas tank, unloading the dishwasher, bathing screaming over-tired children, picking up all the tiny Legos around the living room at the end of the day.
To do all this—in love. How extraordinary.
Nadya Williams is Managing Editor for Current.
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Love, memory, and Camel cigarettes
This morning I dropped my kids off at school, and I’m sitting in our backyard. The day is dry and cool. Bounded between mountain ridges, the sky is full of clouds, smooth and patterned like cobblestones. A few crows cawed their objection when I sat down on the back steps, then a rasp of leaves from a squirrel rooting at the edge of the lawn. Now the steady sound of passing cars on the street.
My wife is running errands with our daughter. If she saw me now, she’d be confused. Because on this Tuesday morning, I’m smoking a single Camel cigarette.
It’s an elegy fifty years in the making: Prompted by cassette tapes that my father gave me that feature the voices of his family and friends, mailed to him in Vietnam, I’m reflecting on my grandparents, smoking the same kind of cigarette they did. Their voices on the tapes are so young, full of concern for my dad. The tapes have prompted me to think about memory and the love that we bear for those who are gone—how love endures in spite of death. My grandmother died when I was a teenager. Some of my earliest memories are sightseeing trips with her around our hometown in her army green Buick Skylark. I never met my grandfather. He was killed in a plane crash the year before I was born.
On the day after the crash, my father walked into the field where it happened, and he found a crushed pack of Camel cigarettes and knew it was my grandfather’s. He said he couldn’t help but laugh because he teased his father about his smoking habit: “Those things will kill you.” My father saved the pack and said if he ever gets a terminal illness, he will smoke the rest of the cigarettes.
I thought, Why wait? So this morning I bought a pack of Camels to commemorate a walk through a crash site that I didn’t take and rides in a Buick Skylark that I did.
“Nothing is more memorable than a smell,” says Diane Ackerman. “Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them.”
I watch the fire burn down the paper and tobacco, inhale, and the aroma is transporting, just like Ackerman says. Like a diving bell, the smell takes me into the past, deep enough to remember an embrace and the feel and smell of my grandmother’s sweater. I note too a missing ingredient, present in my memory but missing from the tang of cigarette smoke this morning: my grandmother’s lavender perfume.
It’s a comfort to know that I carry this memory even still.
Robert Erle Barham is Associate Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He is the deputy editor of Current.
Thank you, each of you, for these. There are aspects of this little collection that illustrate the ‘best’ of Current, reflecting thoughtfully on life, elevating what many simply overlook, and reminding the reader of the greater truths of our human experience.
. . . To be missed.
–Ralph Stone.