My daughter was just recently in her school’s performance of Fiddler On The Roofing system. She was one of the children. If you don’t know the story, it concentrates on the changing culture of marital relationship, from one where the marital relationship is arrainged by household and neighborhood to one based upon mutual attraction.
In one of the tunes, the primary character asks his spouse if she likes him. She responds that for 25 years, she has shared his bed, made his meals, tended his house, raised his children– so what sort of question is that?
The point is that in their relationship, love wasn’t even a concern or consideration. But after some back-and-forth, they choose that, undoubtedly, they love each other.
This led me to think of what I learn about marital relationship. And here is what I consider the concern of love and marital relationship: we fall in love to get together, then spend the rest of our lives learning to like the other.
You see, the preliminary attraction is truly about “I.” “I” feel a particular way, so I understand I am “in love.” But that part of the relationship is driven by my need to feel that way, my requirement to be with the other person, my requirement to have my needs fulfilled.
My needs are sustained by my desire to feel the extreme feeling of “remaining in love.”
But in reality, love is a verb, something I do for the other. It takes the rest of my life to discover how to attend to my spouse’s needs. From my desire to be with my partner comes my desire to meet my partner’s love requirements.
We are “deceived” into commitment by the frustrating sensation of tourist attraction, and after that we have to present effort to produce a sustained relationship.
I say “tricked” because our culture has us believing that this love is the structure of a relationship. It is not.
It is simply a temporary starting point. It is not the location. It is simply a part of the journey to a life time relationship.
Those intense sensations will calm in time. The frustrating requirement to be with someone that marks the infatuation portion of a relationship is not sustainable by itself. It resembles placing a flame in a bottle.
Eventually, the flame will burn all the oxygen in the bottle and be snuffed out.
There has to be some “fueling of the fire.” This is “love,” the verb. When I act in loving methods, I fuel the fire and keep it burning.
If I stop tending to the other’s needs because I don’t feel that infatuation, the relationship will gradually (or not so slowly) die away.
When we continue to believe that “love” (infatuation) is the heart of a relationship, when that feeling is gone, our company believe we are no longer in love. That is not the case; we have just stopped working to fuel the fire.
Reality TV has shown that any 2 people, offered the best scenarios and settings, can fall under love (chemistry of infatuation).
But story after story reveals that it is more difficult to make the switch to “true love” that originates from action. Choose action, and do not be deceived by chemistry.
By acting on love, by making love a verb and not an emotion, we keep the emotional fire stoked. And that is the fantastic paradox: if we depend upon the sensation of remaining in love to keep us together, it will stop working.
However if we set that aside and concentrate on being loving, the sensation of being in love is sustained. Fully grown love is a verb, not a feeling.
In truth, love is a verb, something I do for the other. It takes the rest of my life to learn how to attend to my spouse’s needs. From my desire to be with my spouse comes my desire to fulfill my partner’s love requirements.
The overwhelming need to be with somebody that marks the infatuation part of a relationship is not sustainable on its own. This is “love,” the verb.
