Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime

Two days until Valentine's Day. A not-quite-blizzard gives one time to reflect.

There is at least one great love of everybody's life. Sometimes it's a first love. Sometimes it's baby love. Sometimes it's the best damned dog you've ever shared your life with. Sometimes it cannot reciprocate if your great love is music, mathematics or muscle cars. But it's there. We've all experienced it in some form or other.

Every so often, you meet the person who says "I married the great love of my life". Less often you get to hear that they stay married to the great love of their lives. Sometimes it can be the loss that makes the love so sweet. The romanticization of the past. Sometimes it is outside influences or a greater love of something else that turns good love into the bittersweet 'great love'.

As I peer through the heavy swirls of huge, ploppy flakes outside my kitchen window, I wonder, 'Do you ever stop loving your loves?' That's not as simple a question as it seems, is it? First, you have to ascertain: was it true love? And I mean true love in the literal, not overly romantic, definition of the word. Was it a love of the real person - who they were, who they are and who they may be? Did that love encompass respect, dignity, maturity and honest to goodness like? If so, and you really, truly loved a person, does time, betrayal or bad haircuts diminish that love? Hmm...

My first husband was a great love. He was not my first great love, but he was a great love, nonetheless. I think of him fairly often and remember him with fondness. Do I still love him? The woman I am now still loves the man he was then. But I have not heard from him in over a decade. I have no clue who he is or what he's like. I have no way of knowing if he's still an excruciatingly shy sweetheart of a man or a deranged puppy killer. But I still care about him. I want to know that he's happy and healthy and living a fulfilling life. I am too realistic to delude myself that I am still in love with a man I don't know, but I truly want him to have a lovely life - which he deserves. Does that mean I still love him? Of course it does. Does it mean I love others in my life less? Of course not. That's just silly. In many respects, it enables me to love others in my life more.

The poets and the theological teachings all tell us the same thing. Love is ageless and timeless. It isn't all about the brag and the bling. It isn't all about the lust and the passion (although, I must admit that's a really nice benefit). It's about whether or not you honestly, truly care about another human being. It does not diminish. It alters shape and form. It takes a different place in your heart and mind. It relegates itself to late nights on birthdays and snowstorms. It lets go and it hangs on. It just is.

The snow is getting deeper and so is my rhetoric. I still love all my great loves, each a little differently. Of course, the greatest love of my lifetime is stomping around the kitchen in his blue snowboots, ready to take on the world - or, at least, shovel the sidewalk when it dies down a bit. This one will always be an active love - in so many senses of the word. The other love is sulking in her room. My love for her will never falter - although there are moments in her teenage life when I have to work hard to make certain it never does.

I love love. I love it for its own sake. I love knowing it exists and that I'm able to do it and, sometimes, understand a very little about it. I love being the kind of person that lives for it. I love showing it. I love being in it. I love everything about it except losing it. And even that is sometimes necessary. Which makes me love it even more, now doesn't it?