Love...

As I mentioned in the last post, I saw "The Last Song" with this little girly, Miley Cyrus, in it and I really liked it. That's not what I want to write about though.

I think Nicholas Sparks is great and I have really liked most of his stories even though I have yet to actually read any of them as I've just seen a bunch of the movies so far, but I will sometime. However, "The Last Song" troubled me a little and got me thinking about love. The characters in the movie talk about love saying that it is such a fragile gift that you pray and hope will survive but in the end, sometimes it just leaves you... or some nonsense along those lines. Now that is what I want to write about: what love is (to me) and what it isn't.

In the movies, love is often made out to be some really crazy, abstract, magical, chemistry-driven weirdness that comes and goes as it pleases. I used to believe some of that too, but now that I am married, I have a very different perspective than I did before. As a young girl, I was giddy and nervous when I was with Garrett, but I don't think that's what made him right for me. It wasn't that we had such great chemistry or that I lost all sense of taste when I wasn't around him either. In fact, those things didn't really happen. I wouldn't say we had "great chemistry", whatever that is. We flirted and were attracted to and got along with one another, but in a normal way. And food was normal whether I was with or without him. Of course I enjoyed his company and I liked to eat with him when possible, but that's not anything amazing. I realized he was right for me little by little: like when I learned that he didn't just seem like an upstanding guy, he really was; and when I learned that he had righteous goals and values that would always outweigh any minor flaws I could see in him; and when, unlike my previous "love" interests, I could NOT imagine ever breaking up with him and learned that he felt the same way about me. This little list is not all inclusive, but my point is that it was not any kind of unique and all-powerful chemistry that did it for us and it was not any particularly amazing experience together that bonded us either, but it was the little things.

And another point I want to make is that love is not a fickle gift that just comes and goes. I think that first you have that attraction and those morals and faith in Christ as a foundation and then you commit to making it work. That's what I think love is. Commitment. Once you decide that you are with the person you want to always be with, you stop thinking in terms of "well, once we split up..." or "we'll just work at this as long as we feel like it and then if it fizzles out, oh well, things happen" or "we were blessed with this grand gift of love for a little while and then the love just faded until it was gone." Love doesn't just fade until it's gone because love means working hard at staying connected. If it just fades away, then one or both members of the relationship were not doing their part to stay connected with the other person. As they say, you have to continually nurture and nourish your relationship. And that's the same with your testimony, you can't just hope that it doesn't fade, you need to actively work to keep it strong and if you realize one day that your faith is gone, it's because you got lazy. You stopped nurturing that relationship with Christ or your companion or whoever. If a person in the relationship commits adultery with someone else, shame on that person, it's NOT okay to do that, but it is also very likely that those in the relationship stopped working at making each other happy a long time before that and that is why they strayed to someone else in the first place. Or the person who committed adultery wrongfully believed that they felt love for the original person for a little while and then love left so they had to seek to find it again with someone else. Anyway, that's not how it works.

So this is me on my soapbox. If you can't tell, I feel very strongly about it. I think the media is confusing a lot of single people and even married people into thinking that love comes and then moves along whenever it wants. Love is being more concerned about the other person's happiness than our own and it is not always an easy thing. You have to work really hard and remain incredibly patient and forgiving and stay committed. And if you do that, love will generally not just leave. And that is what I think about love. The end.