Treatise on Love

I [heart] you. Blech. Phooey. Let’s not talk about how, on this one day of the year, we will all pause to remember that we love our girlfriend/boyfriend, spouse, partner, etc. (or that many of us forget it the other 364 days), as we stuff our faces with Brach’s mystery chocolates and watch our Wal-Mart roses wilt. Let’s talk about the real deal—the kind of lasting love that takes work, effort, elbow grease. EVERY day is the day for that.

Ray and I have been together for 26 years, married for 23 of those. I don’t think he’d mind me telling you that, like many long-together couples, we are usually somewhere on the relationship Matterhorn—that roller coaster of ups, downs, occasional blessed straightaways, twists, and a black-out tunnel every now & then. There are days when Ray doesn’t like me much—I am decidedly unlikeable some days. There are days when I don’t like him. There are days when we’re both fuming and retreat to our respective hidey-holes for hours of sizzling silence. But we NEVER stop loving each other, and that’s because we’re both committed to the work.

In the giddy flush of new love, humans somehow become convinced (volcanic brain activity caused by too much dopamine, I believe) that love is spontaneous, effervescent…that it magically bubbles up as a refreshing, cleansing mist of goodness & light from cracks in the earth, or it rains down on us in sudden delightful showers of…oh, I dunno…happy, Smurfy, tickly glitter. And yeah, I totally LOVED that all-too-brief phase. But PHASE is the key word.

Once that dopamine rush levels off, you’d better roll up your sleeves. Because suddenly, you’re gonna notice the toilet seat’s up, or he left the space heater on, or she forgot to pay the light bill, or he brought home another stray animal, or…huh? When did you start living in pink sweats and an old gas station shirt?

The real work is holding ever-present in your mind the notion that you signed on for the long haul. Yes, you might throw up going down that next roller-coaster freefall, but once you reach the bottom, you will still be alive (and sometimes, with a renewed sense of the thrill). Most of the time, you have to willfully, consciously, remember what you love about each other. You have to listen—find out about, and tend to, each other’s needs, even when you don’t feel like it. Even when you just downloaded a new mystery on your Kindle. You have to stick it out. As my friend LuLu says, the secret to a lasting marriage is not getting divorced.

I should say here that it takes TWO of you working. Sadly, no amount of working on your own can save love from someone who’s already (mentally, at least) jumped off the ride.

For the rest of us, yes, the bloom WILL come off the rose eventually. This will happen even to those of you deep in the dopamine/endorphin throes, vowing that YOUR love will always be flame & fireworks. But know that in the coming years, if you do the work—and it’s DAILY work—you’ll end up with a more profound sense of trust, an amazing shared history, and a more peaceful and abiding kind of love than you knew was possible.

And I know I’m badly mixing metaphors here, but don’t throw out the rose—every blue moon, it will suddenly, mysteriously burst into full bloom. Just this morning, for example, I noticed that Ray had scrubbed shiny-clean the glass top stove when I wasn’t looking. I smiled and thought, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”