Part VI: Legislating Love is not Loving
Love is not a commodity, it cannot be bought, sold, traded, or replicated
For newbies, this is the sixth installment of I Changed My Mind on Sexuality, and it’s another long one.
I thought I understood what love was and perhaps I did. I knew love from friends, family, community. I knew the backside of it too, the feeling of love lost, love broken, love withheld. But I did not know the kind of love I know now.
Ours is an easy marriage, as the marriages I have known go. I am the child of warring parents, finally divorced in my twenties, married to a man who was divorced in his thirties. I am of the age now where many of my friends who married at 19, 22, 26, rose-eyed, proudly unkissed, making virgin vows to one another, are now in their 40s, sneering at one another from opposite sides of the kitchen island, now staring steeled straight in divorce court, now dividing houses, memories, weekends with the children.
So yes, in comparison, ours is an easy marriage.
We default to Nate’s preferential life of habits and rhythms, the guardrails he magically forms from thin air to keep himself himself. We interrupt them with my preference for disruption and friction, risk and sometimes reward. We have learned to lean toward one another instead of leaning on the other, crushing them with the ways our way is better than theirs. This is compromise. This is life. This, too, is love.
What is it we vow? To love, honor, cherish, through everything? But what do we know of love on that side of the vow? No. Love is just a feeling until it meets with the manifold layers of life, then it becomes action.
All marriage is either action or inaction. If it is a good marriage, it is moving toward one another, and in doing so, losing more of our own self on the way. It is, despite what the bible says and the priests echo, not one flesh. It can be put asunder in ten-thousand different ways, most of them small, inconsequential, hardly noticed or noticeable. It is, one hopes though, somewhere on the road to becoming one-flesh.
More than anything, though, our marriage is not your marriage. It is not our parents’ marriages. It is not our friends’ marriages. It is not the marriage of pastors we have had, pundits we have listened to, theologians and philosophers we have read.
There is nothing new in the world except there is. Never before in the annals of time and the epochs of history has this man and this woman vowed to replace the toilet paper roll the right way, promised to keep the volume below this level, promised for years to not order Thai food, vowed to keep on top of the budget, to do sex this way, to ask questions that way, to not chew this way, to see this therapist and go to that church and remember to move the car from the left side of the street to the right side and on which days, to pick up the conversation we started last Tuesday as if no time has passed, to clean the dog’s ears and make the grooming appointment and pick up the CSA and get the kind of floss he likes and the kind of yogurt she likes.
No matter how common our love (and I am not so wildly arrogant to believe our love is superior), it is our love, and although love is only love if it is shared, ours cannot be shared with you in any meaningful way. I do not feel the need to defend our love, prove our love, demonstrate our love, categorize it, replicate it, prescribe its ways for or to others, or commodify it in any way for you or anyone else.
And I am no longer interested in asking others to do so either.
Once again, a long preamble to the next in my series on I Changed my Mind on Sexuality. This one on how my own marriage has both challenged and affirmed me, leading me to challenge and affirm others in ways I wasn’t capable of before.
This is the sixth part of the series. You can read the introduction, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
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