Old Love

Here are some things we know to be true about love---the most transforming, ennobling, life-affirming and self-transcending emotion any of us will ever feel.

Love shows itself in the long run. What we feel at first for someone we might want to marry could be love, or merely a transient passion. Only over time do we come to know that love is real. Loves requires sacrifice, patience, listening, compromise and most of all, courage--the courage to reveal yourself utterly to another human being. It takes only a moment to breathe heavily, but a long time to know if heavy breathing is born of love.

Love is not in you, but between you and the one you love. Love is not an idea, but a relationship, the force that bonds you together. In that space between you and your beloved, a brighter light shines than the one that emanates from your own soul. Because love is between people, it cannot be merely contemplated, but must be acted out and sustained so the bond never breaks.

Love is the only emotion that inoculates you against the cancer of selfishness. Love brings you out of yourself and your own obsessions into a world where you find yourself by losing yourself. The sacrifices people willingly make for those they love would never be offered for any other reason.

Love is the glue of families. Families don't exist to help us learn to love others, but because we love others. The love we learn in families is the greatest gift and most important asset we bring to our work in the world. In the best families, parents give more love than they need to receive. Children from such families grow up overflowing with with love, then slowly discover the reason they were loved so much: so they can love their own children the same way.

There's a special beauty to old love. People blessed with long marriages, and those lucky enough to see the children of their children's children, know secrets about love the rest of us can't comprehend. Old love is not just deep; it is wise, patient and knowing. The beauty of old love is the beauty a smooth face can never know. Old love is the closest thing to the way God loves us all.