If one thing is true in all the world it’s that everyone wants to be loved. You can make it a rule: there isn’t anybody, anywhere, who doesn’t want to be loved. The most bitter people-haters have chosen to be that way because they feel ugly and unloved.
That means that the world can be won by love. Minds can be changed, angry attitudes overcome, perverse personalities transformed. Love can do all that.
There’s an element in love that reaches out in such openness and gentleness, takes the other person by surprise, breaks down his defenses, and reconciles him. So when you’re dealing with love, you’re dealing with the most potent force the world knows.
Love is the most vital force affecting our lives. You need to be loved as a tiny baby if you’re to have half a chance in the world. Mental disorder very often dooms the unloved young. And the worst battle of the soul for the growing number of aged men and women is the feeling of being rejected and unloved. And in middle life, at the height of his powers, the man who says he needs no one, nothing but his work, is fooling himself. He is striving for someone’s love, the love of his wife, children, secretary, or maybe the world “out there.”
And the way love is fulfilled, the way it is most exciting and rewarding, is when it is shared — when each one gives something to the other. And all you really have to give, in love, is yourself, your heart, dreams, deep feelings, song, spirit, into someone else’s keeping.
He gives to you, and you give to him. If only one person is giving, it is idolatry and not love. It’s hero worship or goddess worship, but it’s not love. Nothing is coming back, nothing is being shared.
Of course, if you do share, you’re taking a risk. Because true love doesn’t give away something cheap or dispensable. True love gives away itself, its inner things, its secret things. It’s your innermost being that you give to your lover, and the unwritten plea that goes with it is “Please don’t trample on me. Don’t ridicle me. I’ve no defense, no hidden retreat left if you don’t take me, and accept me, and love me back!”
Love given is precious. It must be held with gentle hands, and cherished, and defended. It’s a little like the beautiful rendering in The Living Bible of Paul’s words to the Corinthians:
“If you love someone you will be loyal to him no matter what the cost. You will always believe in him, always expect the best of him, and always stand your ground in defending him”
— (1 Corinthians 13 : 7).
Love is sharing, taking the other’s part, identifying yourself with him. And if you don’t give yourself away into the other’s keeping and receive that one into your own keeping — well, it isn’t really love!
Giving your life away, not only to the other person but for the other person (which is very much the same thing) is the final test, then, of our love too. Most of us in this life are not pressed to that extremity. We dream of living a lifetime together with our loved one, and reaching old age rich in shared years and shared memories. But true love believes that it’s always ready to go that far for the other, and lives in the assumption that if ever put to that ultimate test for the loved one, it wouldn’t fail.
And yet, it’s this giving this sharing, this entering into the life of the other one that scares us most about getting married. And young love makes much of holding something back, of “being myself,” of “refusing to lose my own identity in my husband’s or my wife's identity.”
The significance of married love is that two lives become one life. They become one common enterprise, one shared experience, one single adventure. Anything that touches one can’t help touching the other. No victory or defeat can come into the life of one without also coming into the life of the other.
“No man is an island entire to itself. Each man’s death diminishes me” — John Donne.
“Love you? I am you!” — Jim Turpin
What’s beautiful is the shared life together with another person. That’s why marriage is worth preparing for and preserving something sacred of oneself for, in order to bring your best self to it.
In conclusion, Robert Louis Stevenson was a man fulfilled and deepened by his love and marriage. He wrote of his mate thus:
Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold, and bramble-dew.
Steel true, and blade straight
The Great Artificer made my mate.
Honor, anger, valor, fire,
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The Mighty Master gave to her.
Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free,
The August Father gave to me.
