Love is an Old Shoe

More nonsense has been written about love than about anything else except maybe toenail fungus. People say that love, which comes only once in a lifetime, is a “strange bewilderment” that overtakes you (James Thurber), a “glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze” (Elinor Glyn). It “happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment” declares Sarah Dessen. Love is mystical, decreed by fate, irrational. It comes over you like measles. But that’s fantasy, not love. Fantasy is the denial of reality, because it demands absolutes: You are the only one in the history of the world who can make me happy. You are the most beautiful person who ever lived. None of that is true. Fantasy is the enemy of reality: You don’t fantasize about people you’ve seen on the toilet.

Love is caring, sharing, and bearing

Real love embraces reality, the joy of making a life together, with all its minor pains and satisfactions, bad breath and dirty dishes, joint aches and warm hands on a chilly night. True love may involve intense affection. After fifty years of marriage, my mother would still gush like a teenager when my father came home from giving piano lessons. But that wasn’t the measure of her love. It was the commitment, the respect, the devotion to his welfare, the way they shared life. I feel a powerful flood of affection for my wife many times each day. But that’s just icing on the cake, the glow on the cheek of youth, as Aristotle put it. An uniced cake can still be a delight, and few would gobble up a plate of just icing.  Love isn’t a feeling. It is a way of living. Martha Nussbaum identifies compassion, reciprocity, and individuality as central to love. I like to say that love is caring, sharing, and bearing. You truly care about the other person. Aquinas says love is willing the good of another, and you do so, says Osho Rajneesh, “because you enjoy doing [things] for the person you love.” You share your thoughts and failures and triumphs and everyday moments. Monica Burton points out that “talking about your hopes and dreams is a big part of how you make a connection in your relationship.” Real love has built “a foundation of connection where there is safety in sharing the most intimate of thoughts, emotions, desires, musings, insecurities and fears” (Marc S. DeBord). And, working together, you bear each other’s pains and joys. You pursue projects together, says Aristotle, always with a view to what is good: raising children, working toward social justice, creating art, pursuing the good in all its different aspects.

The many ways of love

There are many kinds of love, of course. The heart has many chambers. There are many ways to love. I love my children. I’m devoted to their welfare, of course, but the way in which I share their lives is different from the way I share my wife’s life, and different now, when they are adults, from the way I entered into their childhood world of wonder and hurt. I love my friends, and true romance is 85% friendship, but there is a difference (that isn’t just about sex, the most obvious difference). That 15% matters. I would sacrifice my life for my wife or my children, but I would hesitate to make my kids fatherless for a friend. Universal, abstract love, what the Greeks called “agape,” is a good thing. The African notion of Ubuntu recognizes our common humanity, to be treated with integrity, decency and respect. The Buddhist who achieves metta—loving kindness toward all living things—is admirable. It is noble to sacrifice for the sake of humanity. But personal love is different. Personal love celebrates and cherishes the particular: the specific quirks and memories and faults and dreams and fears that separate one individual from another, that make you unique. Partners and friends are not fungible. You can’t swap them out like toothbrushes. In a marriage, the commitment to each other is close to total, the shared project is more or less a life. In friendship the commitment is more limited and the world built together a smaller though vital miniworld in the multiverse of a life.

Love is like an old shoe

Real love is like an old shoe. Over time, the struggle between pebbles and sole, raindrops and leather, between foot shape and shoe shape, have, like water against stone, worn down the shoe to a familiar and comfortable fit, a bit scruffy, less than ideal, but good enough to walk through life with, if you take care of it. That’s love. There are eight billion people in the world. Somebody else would have been better: the odds of meeting the most perfect fit for you are miniscule. But you’ve made a life together, and you wouldn’t change it for anyone else, even for someone with whom you could, potentially, have made an even better life. Because it is your life, it is the life of the person you have become and as whom you know and love yourself. And you have, together, developed affection and mutual concern and intimacy and joy and laughter and shared secrets and understandings you can’t imagine yourself without.

An old shoe is honest: it doesn’t conceal the true shape of the foot. It doesn’t pretend, like a new shoe, that the foot is sleek, symmetrical, stylish. Its shape is human, lumpy, molded by walking through paths smooth and rough. An old shoe accepts the true shape of the foot. “True love is first, love which does not conceal,” notes Foucault. Lies, manipulation, deception—these are tools for working the world to one’s will, like a sculptor chiseling stone. But a loved one is not a stone. Real love is honest, like an old shoe, forgiving, accepting, truthful.

Does love complete you?

Does love complete you? Yes and no. In The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes insist that love is completion. Aristophanes tells a myth in which we were originally two people, attached back-to-back, either two men, or two women, or a “man-woman.”  Zeus separated us in halves, so we always seek our other half. In love the separated souls are reunited as one. Ironically, this is half right. In a love relation, whether parent/child, marriage, friendship, or sibling, you build a world together, a world in which you live together part or (almost) all of your time. You don’t complete each other—you build something new. And you come to see and understand yourself, who you are, in part through the prism of that world. You grow. What identifies love, Amelie Rorty reminds us, is a kind of narrative, a story in which the lovers have been changed by their love. So, in that sense, all your loves—not just for people but also your passions and avocations—complete you by changing you. It is not like filling in a predetermined outline (coloring within the lines) and not like joining two distinct halves of a puzzle (as Aristophanes’ myth has it). It is more like creating a space to grow into that wasn’t there before. Having me as a dad guided who my children grew up to be, but it also informed who I matured into as I aged. As the song in Wicked has it, “I have been changed.”

Love at first sight?

That is why love is never at first sight. You can feel a spark, a quickening of the heart, in the leap of an instant. That is exciting, but it is not love. Sometimes it fizzles out. If you’re lucky, it begins to smolder, burn slowly but steadily. Actual love grows over time. It is a gnarly vine, full of twists and blemishes, gifting savory grapes. That’s why divorce is like having half of yourself cut off. You will regrow, after your partner dies or leaves, but it will be a foot of a different shape requiring a different shoe. After your heart has been broken, it is never the same. It heals, but with scar tissue. Yet, over time, you come to realize that its new shape, far from being deficient, is capable of new things you never imagined. The landscape of mortality is a landscape of ruins, and that applies to love as much as anything. It is the human genius to recognize the beauty of ruins and the glory of old shoes.

Is true love unconditional?

Is true love unconditional, as many say? (For example, clinical social worker Kate McGahan says “love isn’t love until it’s unconditional.”) Love is either personal, a response to the unique and particular person the other is, or impersonal. Ideally, love for your children is both. You love them because they are your children, regardless of who they are as individuals. Whoever they become, you will always love them. This love is unconditional, since they will always be your children. But in addition to this impersonal love, ideally, you also come to love them for who they are as particular people. This personal love necessarily changes as they change, or else it wouldn’t be a response to who they are. People usually say “I love my children all the same.” This is half true. The impersonal love I have for my four children is exactly the same, because they are equally my children. My personal love for them shifts and changes as they (and I) change and grow. It is unique to each child. I love them each in their own way. The love I have for my wife is a personal love. It is strong and steadfast. As we change, we find new ways to love each other. But it is not unconditional. If, unthinkably, she became a Nazi, a person I could no longer respect, I could no longer love her. I might still care about her for the person she used to be. But I would have to say “that is not the person I fell in love with. In an important sense she no longer exists.” True love is not inconstant. It does not shift with the breeze. But it is not unconditional. There are limits. The limits are flexible. There is great room for forgiving, for adjusting, for working through together. It takes a radical change to break the bonds of genuine love–not just a transgression, but a fundamental change in who one is.  If you live with someone with extreme dementia, you cannot truly love whom they have become, but you continue to love the person they used to be, whom you care for in them. The shadow of your love for the person they used to be falls over them. That shadow love can be very strong, very real, and very painful. Strong love casts a deep shadow.

Loving another and loving yourself

Sometimes people say you can’t love another if you don’t love yourself. I would put it this way. What you love is the truest mirror of who you are. In loving you, I love myself, for I cannot see myself apart from the garden that, together, we have grown.

Disclaimer

Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.