Love and Marriage

I went to a wedding last night. I'm always amazed at how my life works. I have a new friend who I met by recently inviting some women on Match.com to join Wow. It's hard to make friends at our age, really hard, like where would we meet them and probably they don't have time for someone new and how much would we have in common? But, lucky me, I have several new friends and I really like them a lot and already they have enhanced my life in special ways. So, one of these ladies invited me and my new boyfriend to come to the wedding of her son and I was delighted. First, that a new friend thought enough of me to want me to join her at an event so close to her heart. Plus, I thought it would be fun for me and the new BF to go to a dress-up event and socialize and dance. And it was.

Having been married, not so happily, and then divorced, I have a lot of mixed feelings about weddings. It's hard to be optimistic about a new marriage, considering my past and how many friends have been badly divorced and the statistics and all that. But I wanted to go with a joyful attitude, so I spent part of the day reading "Courage, My Love" by Merle Shain, a "meditation on the very nature of love itself." She writes about our yearning for love, our need to make up for love not given to us as children. We seek and find love, only to want someone else, or we find love and it fails us, so we leave and blame the other person. She writes that we think love is supposed to "make us feel whole and happy, rich and beautiful and even thin, and if it doesn't we think we married the frog instead of the prince and take steps to trade him in" and that we "expect a lot from love - often a lot more than we expect from ourselves." She quotes Mark Twain who wrote that love is "the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval." Her real premise is that we look to love to validate ourselves, to prove we are OK, to prove that we are valuable and loveable, but that it is "your own love you are looking for, not anybody else's" and that we can seek and find who we think is our perfect mate, some who "sees the person you want to believe you are" but that "if you don't give yourself approval, they won't be able to do anything much for you, no matter how much they try." She writes that there are three stages to love, starting with that "Some Enchanted Evening" experience in which we bring all our hopes and expectations from the past to the present, and that often these have little or nothing to do with the person we have just met, but is more a figment of our imagination. She writes that romantic love is an "infirm thing, made from equal parts of hope and fraud...call it an opiate, a petition, a malady, it is not anything of love." The second stage is when we realize that we are both human, that we have flaws, and that we aren't the fantasy we created ourselves to be, so we often abandon each other, saying "what did I ever see in him?" The third stage is an honest view of the reality of the person we have found and who has found us. And that, creating a "we" requires that we keep the "I" alive, knowing that the person isn't a illusion we have created - "it's often easier to flesh out someone with your own creativity and fall in love with what you've made, the real joy is understanding and accepting and loving what you find."

So I went to the wedding feeling grounded, knowing that I have learned what Merle writes from my own experiences, that to love and be loved requires authencity, really being ourselves which again requires knowing ourselves. And that love is not just a feeling, because feelings come and go, that that it is a verb, an action, and intention. It requires being invisible, allowing our real selves to be seen, trusting that the one who loves us as we really are will be patient while we continue to grow and even give us credit for trying even when we don't get it right.

Still, I was not sure whether the couple entering this commitment understood this reality at all. It was a lovely wedding and my friend was glamorous and beautiful and joyful, surrounded by her happy children and friends. And to my great pleasure, it sure seemed like the bride and groom, even in their youth, had created a love that was based on friendship and liking each other and respecting each other. From what I could see and hear, they really knew each other well and had a great appreciation for the wonderful qualities in each other but also desired to see the other succeed and grow to be better people.

And me? I had the best time! I was so happy to see my friend joyful, I was thrilled that her date was a friend of my new BF and that she'd met him at my last party, and I was happy to be part of such a lovely and touching experience. But most of all, I was happy because I'm finally with a man who knows me, the real me, and seems to think I'm pretty terrific. And he dances!!! Ain't love grand?