Martha and I were having a bit of a visit the other night, and she was asking me to talk honestly about what marriage is like, since being married is something I have done too often and she has never done yet.
“When it’s good,” I told her, “it’s the best thing in the world. It’s an amazing thing to share your life with someone who wants to share back. But when it’s all gone bad, it’s horrible. It’s worse than being alone.”
And that’s what I think about love. It can make us happy. It can make us sad. I read that “Broken Heart Syndrome” is an actual medical condition, and I believe it.
Truly being in relationship with someone makes your heart a hostage, means that you cannot control what happens to it. Some days your heart will be pummeled, some days soothed, and many days both.
And yet, knowing love, expressing love, being shaped by love leads to the only life that matters.
As we roll into another Valentine’s Day season, I’ve been thinking a lot about love. I’ve been in love and out of love, have been loved and have loved as a father, husband, boyfriend, friend, sibling, child—and I know that love is simultaneously my greatest source of joy and meaning and my greatest source of pain.
I’m not intending to be glass-half-full here by any means; I’ve known a life filled with love and one without, and I choose love every time, hands down, no matter what the risks. I’ve written a couple of novels, Free Bird and Cycling, about men so badly hurt that they’ve preferred not to love again, or at least tried not to, although fortunately that didn’t work out for them. I’ve cheered for George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham in this past year’s Up in the Air as he began to recognize that a risk-filled life loving other people is better and ultimately more satisfying than a safe but sterile life that keeps everyone else at arm’s length.
So I’m speaking here of more than romantic love, although I am including that. I’m also speaking of love for friends, of love for family, of love for God and God’s love for us. I’ve seen people who have denied or built walls to exclude some or all of these kinds of love from their lives, and I myself have been guilty of most at one time or another, to my great detriment.
And yet now, in a life where, mostly, I am trying to live fear-free and embrace love with all its possibilities, I am still experiencing simultaneous joy and heartbreak. I’ll leave Martha out of this, since she is a private person and prefers not to have her feelings circulating through the interwebs. But without violating anyone’s privacy but my own, I can say that the greatest heartbreak of my life has not been, perhaps surprisingly, the dissolution of my marriages, even at their train-wreck worst, or the loss of any of my love relationships, despite the great hopes I might have had for them.
No, my greatest heartbreak has been being separated from my children.
Jake, my older son, remained in Oklahoma with his mom after I moved to Texas to take the only (!) academic job offered to me after I got my PhD, the job I still hold at Baylor University. From Jake’s age 4 until he turned 18, we saw each other once a month and for stretches in the summer and over Christmas. He grew up outside my gaze, his daily life (except for a short, difficult, but also joyous stretch when I had temporary custody of him) a mystery to me. I loved him so much that his absence was like a hole in my heart; sometimes late at night I sat in his dark empty Texas bedroom, surrounded by his toys and books, and wept.
Now he is 24, and lives in Austin. That hole in my heart has been sewn up and seems to be healing nicely, thanks be to God.
But a year ago September, his brother Chandler, my younger son, moved from Austin, where I had seen him almost daily through his first 11 years, to North Carolina.
And I am going through all of this all over again.
Chandler is coming in a few weeks for a spring break visit, and then I will see him again in the summer, and we talk almost daily and Skype when we can. I know we are making the best of circumstances, that we have more ways to communicate than Jake and I did, but I would still give almost anything to have him here, to feel him try and wriggle loose when I try and hug him, to feel him push my hand aside as I try to mess up his hair, to stand nearby just watching him climb trees or shoot baskets or play piano.
Only love can break your heart. And only love can mend it.
I heard that somewhere.
Maybe it is true that everyone has a place where love hurts as well as heals. Maybe you already know that you can have a generally joyful life, and still have one aspect of it in which your heart is broken.
When Chandler comes to Austin in a few weeks, my joy will be complete. And when I put him on the plane back to his mom, my heart will hurt.
And still, despite this cracked little corner of my otherwise joyful life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Happy Valentines Day to all the lovers, the parents, the friends, the brothers and sisters, the children, the Children of God.
And thanks be to God for love itself, and for being Love Itself.
Someday love will bring us nothing but joy, and I am praying and working for that day.
Leave a Reply