“The Lovers,” a 1928 oil on canvas by Rene Magritte
Once a year, my girlfriends and I meet for Christmas brunch.
We've been a close-knit group of six since high school, and it’s been fascinating to watch our relationships – with ourselves, with each other, with the world – change over the years.
During college, we’d meet up and give PowerPoint presentations on our lives. One person would present while the rest of us passed around hard seltzers and laughed until our stomachs hurt (there were hilarious nights abroad in Italy, psycho sorority sisters, close encounters with death, almost arrests, and many mental breakdowns).
Now, there’s more talk about financial struggles and career changes. But we always talk about love. We meet at the same restaurant – the one with the massive pancakes and the fancy kale and ginger juices. As we slide into the booth, peeling off winter coats and beanies and settling in with our hot mugs of coffee, one of the girls will excitedly start:
“So, how are things?”
We’ll go in a circle, giving a brief overview of the current state of our lives. Once it gets to me, someone will ask:
“How’s Jack?”
“He’s great!” I say, and sip my coffee. Conversation over.
There’s no juicy fights, no petty drama, no he’s been pissing me off recently and here’s the PowerPoint I made about it. Compared to my past relationships, meeting Jack was like dunking my head in a tub full of ice water: shocking, refreshing, and it didn’t make any sense. It was the first time I experienced biblical love – patient, kind, sacrificial, humble, forgiving. It’s devastating to me that I (and so many other people) would ever dream of settling for less.
Love and Literary Tropes
When it comes to love, books and movies get it wrong.
Our most beloved literary tropes (common motifs that move a story forward) have to do with the impossible romance: enemies to lovers, forbidden love, and love triangles.
In other words, we’re suckers for the theatrical.
We want to believe love is this intense beast that swallows us whole – that finding our soulmate is pure drama and tension and all-consuming, earth-shattering passion. There’s nothing like falling in love with someone who's explicitly horrible for us.
“You’re like a drug to me,” Edward Cullen infamously tells Bella Swan in Twilight, and we eat that up in big, heaping forkfuls.
Is this what we’ve subjected love to? Ecstatic highs, dramatic lows, infatuation and obsession? If falling in love is an emotional high, then loving is something else entirely.
Being In Love vs. Loving
“When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness,” Louis de Bernières writes. “It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision.”
This moment of decision holds weight that many people aren’t willing to carry. It’s why some treat commitment like a prison; why divorce rates are so high; why people claim “monogamy just isn’t for me.”
The reality is that love is not a volatile emotion, but a state of being. It’s an extension of who you are. It’s willful and habitual. You wake up every day and put this person first, even if you don’t feel like it.
C.S. Lewis writes:
“Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run.”
When you find the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, it’s not friction and intensity. There’s an old saying that goes: “If he makes you nervous, he’s not the one.” Love is easy, gentle, second-nature. Not easy in the sense where you don’t have to work hard; but easy like walking out your front door on a warm spring day. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right.
Can you name one movie like this? Where a couple shoots down drama, communicates with humility, and tirelessly puts the other person’s needs above their own? Neither can I. This kind of love is steady, selfless, and unsexy. A movie like that would never sell.
But there’s magic in this second sense of love that isn’t in the first.
The privilege to love someone quietly; to steady them when they stumble; to be each other’s strength and not each other’s weakness; to orbit around the room in sync, two planets of the same solar system. I would choose this love over and over again.
Sitting at brunch with my girlfriends every Christmas, talking about love, sometimes it’s snowing. From the inside looking out, most people only notice the blizzard. The chaos of it all. The frenzy of cars sliding off the road, hazard lights blinking rapidly. Few turn their focus to the snowflakes that gently tap the windowsill, one by one.
Margaret Atwood writes:
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
Love isn’t drugs. It’s air.
Reading Recommendation:
”What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
A collection of short stories by Raymond Carver about love, loss, and life. Carver writes with a bare-bones, Hemingway-esque style, emphasizing plain language and haunting themes about the human condition.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition of The G Word. If you’re feeling moved, pass it along. I’m honored to play a role, however small, in your Saturday.
G
This is so good, Grace, that I read it twice. And the second time was way better than the first. Thank you :)
This is a breath of fresh air itself Grace. Your writing matches the calm and potent depth you describe as the possibility for love. I’ve been married for 18 years and more and more we find the new layers of acceptance and stillness that most definitely endure beyond the dramas. Though I’d say we’ve experienced both. Like Rome, relationships are not built in a day.