Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
Kinds of Loving
Karen Johnson Gustafson
The drive between Knife River and Duluth is, as many of you know, breathtakingly beautiful in any weather in the daytime. At night except when there is moon or northern lights, it's just another dark road with deer and slippery spots that I want to traverse as efficiently as possible. So on my way home most nights, I drive on the express way and I listen to books on tape. Most recently I have been listening to a book called Four Letters of Love. It is an Irish book by an Irish writer read by an Irish reader and mostly it is pretty gray and kind of depressing. It's about love. It's about the fragility and resilience and pain and redemption of love between brother and sister and husbands and wives and parents and children and about hope in God. Not really faith in God, only hope.
The author portrays romantic love as a sickness that overtakes the young, robbing them of their ambition, their reason and their desire for anything but the beloved. This obsessive state also magnifies the virtues of the beloved and the faults and unworthiness of the lover, leaving both in a state of passionate ambivalence: on one hand wanting to wholly possess the beloved while at the same time recognizing that a true lover would give up the beloved to the possibility of someone he or she really deserved.
We see in this account the strong role of the loving but controlling parents who have endured the less than anticipated bliss in the aftermath of such romantic love. In this aftermath one of the husbands confounds his broken dreams by abandoning his family to follow the call of God and the other by succumbing to drink. One wife, is overcome by her disappointment, goes slowly crazy and dies and the other engages in a series of desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to protect her daughter from a fate similar to her own.
It's all here, the archetypal stories, which, to one degree or another we have all lived out in one way or another. At some point have we not each experienced that heightened state of desire that leads to the giving over of self to another, either in reality or in our fantasy? Has not the success or failure of that connection caused us to feel alternately more and less worthy? Have we not had parents or been parents who, in the face of certain romantic disaster abandoned hope or sought to interfere in the loves of our children? It would seem that such experiences are inevitable, hard wired into the human psyche.
And so, here we are again, coming up upon the cultural celebration of archetypal romantic love, Valentine's Day, the festival of love sickness. No matter how the commercial establishment tries to reframe Valentine's day to include other kinds of love - valentine's cards to teacher, friend, parent, sibling, mail carrier, neighbor, bus driver etc., the dominant campaign is still upon the heterosexual couple in the dimly lighted restaurant, sipping champagne and exchanging diamonds and anticipating some kind of new beginning replete with ecstasy and wonderment and bliss.
I think that the problem with the romantic love that valentines celebrates is that it is not seen as a bridge to something else but rather as an end in itself. It elevates this kind of loving to a ideal beyond achieving, it feeds the love sickness. At best, the whole valentines thing can provide a particular kind of relationship with a place to experience or remember a time in its unfolding; at worst it can be like offering an illusion addict a fix.
I am not suggesting that Valentine's Day should be abandoned but I do think we could be healthier as a culture if we were to have some other days to celebrate some other ways of loving.
Instead of touting the ecstasy and wonderment of romantic love as that state to which all should aspire and in which each will find ultimate and eternal bliss, it seems to me it would be more helpful to have a day devoted to celebrating old love and the gifts of lost love, a day to tout love in terms of endurance and acceptance and disappointment and forgiveness, to stress self love and love of God as essential prerequisites in successful love of another, as what it ultimately takes to get beyond romance and into the possibility of mature and/or lasting love.
What makes this difficult, of course, is that romantic love of the culturally touted kind has a universal quality to it. All new love, at any age, in reality or fantasy is the same. It involves, by necessity all that irrational speculation and projection and hopefulness and desire that allows us to do sometimes outrageous and often ill advised things - my first boyfriend in college had no car and double dates did not last long enough for us. So the driver couple would leave us at the house where I lived in Woodland and he would walk to his home in downtown Duluth at 3 in the morning in sub zero temperatures without a hat. He sent me roses he couldn't afford and was late for every ten o'clock class for a quarter because after he walked me to my class there was not time to get to his. You undoubtedly have your own stories. This is not to trivialize this behavior. It may seem hopeless and ill fated from the outside but from the inside there is no greater need or drive. This is the universal nature of such love.
Old love or past love is hard to celebrate because it is that which emerges on the other side of romantic love and as such involves qualities so unique to each relationship as to defy generalization. Sometimes it is apparent to the naked eye, two people together who exude quiet admiration and respect and affection for one another. But I have long ago learned not to judge the quality of another's loving based upon what would be loving for me. There is a quality of commitment, of acceptance of respect and understanding that sometimes might seem to me to be more like endurance and tolerance and forbearance out of which will emerge some heart stopping manifestation of deep caring and generosity.
Couples come for counseling who have concluded for themselves that the relationship is over. What I conclude is that their first love has passed. They are often experiencing the death of romantic love. They are finished with the frustration of either not having or not being the right partner. They are tired of unmet expectation and unfulfilled promises. What we try do then is to look at the sources of the expectations and the motivation for the promises. Often the expectations arose out of what the culture has told them they had a right to expect out of long term commitment, expectations that had little or nothing to do with the gifts or the interests of the people involved. Fulfillment, they were led to believe came in the form of the relationship regardless of the content of the lives that were brought together. Promises broken were promises made, not out of what was realistic to promise but out of the hope that promising itself would be self fulfilling. The result is so often feelings of such inadequacy in the self and/or disappointment in the other that seems to be no way but out.
I found one expression of this in my own history in this poem I wrote to my first husband in 1973:
Saturday Morning
I bitched at you this day
And wonder once again
If you can accept that it was the disappointment
Inside of me that made it happen.
I was disappointed again
That I could not be
Perfect...
In a love as deep as ours
The things that make us bitch
Seem not to be so much
the ways in which we let eachother down
But the ways in which we miss the mark
Of being the person
We wish each other
Could have married.
How much I needed at that point someone to say, "Loving is not about being perfect for another person. It's not about perfection in any way. Perfection is a romantic notion, a gross over simplification of human potential. Loving is messy and complicated and no body knows much about it, not much they can share, anyway. So celebrate and learn from the good times and struggle with and learn from the bad times; keep your hopes high and your expectations low, base them on who you are coming to know as yourself and who you are coming to know this other person to be. Love is not an outcome; it's a process. Let the notion of perfect love die; compost it in your fertile psyche and let it be reborn of self acceptance and gentleness and laughter and lightness of touch."
It took eight years and three children for that hope of perfection to die. In some ways I am even grateful that it did not die sooner. As the children of that union struggle with their own experiences of moving through the perils of romantic love, I see them as only slightly wiser. And I don't really know what to tell them, though I know they have seen a good deal of loving of all kinds.
But the death of the dream of perfect love for their parents had has composted well and they have two old marriages to observe and learn from. The point here is, if there is a point, that there are no formulas for the love that follows romance.
There are stories; there are incredible moments of ecstasy and wonderment and bliss. They are part of relationships of all kind and relationships at any stage in which expectations of another are based upon self knowledge, respect for the unknowablness of another human being and humility in the face of the human condition. They are, I think, more often experienced as grace and are celebrated, not in public frenzies of roses and chocolate candy but in quiet amazement.
When there is a rent in the fabric of relationship it is usually because one or both of the individuals is struggling with an issue of self or spirit which, resolved, would allow them to love each other.
Robert Fulghum closes his book on True Love With the following:
"Platitudes are poison. Pick up a book of quotations and turn to the love section and you will soon be turned off. The wisdom looks good but it doesn't look lived in. As I this book (True Love) was assembled I made a list of the really good lines as they turned up.There's the list f the best..."
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The game of love is never called on account of darkness or rain.
Most of us need love the most when we are most unlovable.
Every love story has an unhappy ending sooner or later.
If you concentrate on giving love, your task will seem small but the results large; If you concentrate on getting love, your task will seem large and the results small.
The basic question of love: If you love me still, will you love me moving?
Some say God is love; some say love is God; I say love is holy.
Happy loving.