What is Love?

Love is an enduring active devotion to the well-being of another. Look at the origin of the word. It means "the act of consecrating by a vow". The word "vow" is not to be taken lightly here. It's not equivalent to our contemporary use of the word "promise". The brittleness of modern man is well exhibited by the saying, "Promises are made to be broken." Excuse me, but vows are not. When the word was created, a vow was something you took in a sacred setting, before the deity. You could not break a vow without serious consequences to your soul.
So when you love someone, you take a vow before all that you hold sacred, whether you're a believer or a humanist, to stand up for that person, walk with that person, care for that person, even when it doesn't suit you, even when you'd rather not.
You could call this blog, How to Find Love Over 60, Part IV...because the last item in the list of 12 things on my website is "Choose Love." Love is a choice. After you are done swimming around in the glorious neurochemical seas of falling in love, you climb out onto the shores of true possibility. There you make a choice. To love or not to love. It's that black and white. To love means you're all in. Anything less than that and you are not choosing love. You are toe-dipping or dancing. Love is not for tap-dancers. You will be tested to the limit in love. Humans are relational creatures, creatures of the bond. We need to be entwined with another, to be interdependent with them, to care and be cared for with them. But few of us have what could be called a clean emotional heritage. We have all learned about how to be relational from imperfect people, who learned it themselves from imperfect people. This is not blame. This is cause and effect. If somewhere back in your blood line your people had to survive war, natural disaster, economic calamity...they suffered and such suffering is not easily healed. We deny this generational cascade of hurt at our own risk. It has had its iimpact when we were most vulnerable...as children. A distant or angry father. An overly protective mother. All their behaviors are understandable when we know what they endured...but still, the impact was made. We carry it inside us. The past is not past, but lives in us as ongoing present, deeply imprinted in our brains, bodies, hearts and souls. We tend to see what we have learned to see; tend to hear what we have learned to hear; tend to act as we have learned to act...sometimes to reach out, sometimes to strike out, sometimes to run. All of this unfolds once we choose love. So to be in enduring devotion to the well-being of another includes embracing their imperfection and even the fact that they will inevitably touch our old hurts, sometimes inflict new ones, sometimes really get us and sometimes really miss what's going on with us. The quest for perfection is a sad affliction. To love, we must embrace the fullness of our imperfect humanity. Sunlight and Shadows (see the video of the poem by that title on my website). If we are fortunate, if we are smart, if we are "all in" we may yet gradually learn the gentle presence that will help each of us in this love to heal from that past
and ultimately love each other as the fully developed beings we are capable of becoming.
Life is too short and too fragile to do anything but get up each day with devotion on our minds. To whom am I devoted today? How will I move in that devotion? What can I learn about my partner today? What can I learn about life? To love is to live in the vow, to insist on making space for what is most dear--truth, even painful truth about myself, about my lover; and beauty different from what I was raised to see...the astonishing, pulsating reality of my lover's world as separate from mine; and bond, attachment, entwinement, deep in the eyes, tender against the body, fully devoted to protecting the sacred ground where we meet.