"What is love? Is it a fancy or a feeling...or a Ferrars?"
Sense and Sensibility is perhaps my favorite movie of all time, but it's not the movie I'm writing about...more Marianne Dashwood's question that has been haunting me. Recent converstations and readings have caused me to ponder "what exactly is love?" Being a logical thinker who lives for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth I've been trying to define love. Hard, researchable facts, with words, a summary, that encompasses and applies to all things "love". At the same time I'm a "blue", a "picses", a "romantic", a "woman"...whichever you wish to classify me it is truth I speak when I say I am practically ruled by my eMoTIoNs and I am goverened by my feelings. If I don't feel it's safe I won't go, if I don't feel it's right I won't do it, if I don't feel it's good then it's bad, if I don't feel...I'm not living.
Where is the line drawn? When does the transformation occur? What does it look like?
HOW DO YOU KNOW?? Don't be alarmed. My relationship with Spencer is safe and secure from these musings. I love him, of that I am sure. In fact, I know it's love and not lust...it's different with him. A good different; a feeling that it stretches beyond all things carnal, a knowledge that it can conquer all. Its' stability and reassurance reaches beyond that which I ever thought I experienced previously.
The best part? He loves me too.
The thoughts I have been working through are more a desire to pin down something abstract and hardly concrete. They are NOT a "do I or don't I?" more a "what is it?" and "what isn't it?"
Love is the the greatest and most noble of Christlike attirbutes. It is charity; "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son..." (John 3:16). "Love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10). My questions are not surrounding the Christlike love exemplified by our Savior Jesus Christ, for that is above all and encompasses all. Although it is a law I do not live perfectly despite my daily strife to do so, I understand a love for all mankind, to love as our Father in Heaven and Savior love, is our responsibility and in it we find our joy. My questions revolve around a romantic form. Love between husband and wife.
Someone wise humored my strikingly personal question "what do you think love is?" and his response at first was unsatisfying. It wasn't what I was looking for but as I've mulled over his firm resolution that there is only one form of love and that is the Christlike love...I concluded that in a sense he is right. All things good, all light, all love, is of God. So the love we feel for our children, pets, friends, family, significant others...is a Christlike love. How it is expressed, what it looks and sounds like, what it will and won't do, is where the difference is found.
Many years ago I stumbled upon a quote by C.S. Lewis I feel illustrates the connection I am attempting to make:
"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."
When the importance of the safety and comfort of another surpasses that of your own, there is love. In the late night lullabies of a mother, there is love. In the long hours of work of a husband and father, there is love. In the plethora of prayers spoken on behalf of an individual, there is love. In the sweet appreciation of the ever growing sMiLe of someone who employs your thoughts daily, there is love. In a strong embrace and tears of joy or gratitude, there is love. Within the humor of someone's idiosyncracies, there is love. It is in joy and pain, in sacrifice and selflessness. We know for "where love is, there God is also."
In reply to Ms. Marianne Dashwood's query: Love, even the romantic love, is a feeling and a "Ferrars" in the sense that it's the person, it depends on the individual and the relationship. It is not found in things and goes beyond the thrill of a kiss. It is in the act, the thought, the notion that your happiness is more important to them than they are to themselves. That is love.
It sounds like "I do it cause I want to not because you told me to".
It feels like "...a three point jump shot that's nothin' but net".
It looks like Christ.
