I was thinking about opening my sermon this morning with the following question. If your love life were a Website, which of the following would be its URL? Love.com? Love.org? Love.in-need-of-edu? Or love-I-need-a-bigger.net? But then I saw an article in the Friday edition of theWall Street Journal, titled "'Like' is in the Air: Greeting Cards are Commitment-Phobic This Year." It reported that love is out of fashion these days. Instead of saying "I love you" this Valentine's Day, a lot of people are saying three different little words: I like you. Imagine getting a card tomorrow that says: "In the hustle and bustle of my busy day, you're my quiet moment." Or this: "Call me and we'll do that talk thing. Have a fun Valentine's Day." Or "Something exciting is happening between us. I'm not sure where it will go."
The article went on to ask why people are more commitment-phobic today than in the past. The signs of the trend are much in evidence. Long term relationships are in decline: little more than half the U.S. adult population is married today, compared with 75% in the 1970s. Electronic greetings, which tend to be more informal and less forthcoming, are on the rise. And according to one chain of flower shops in the Washington area, the number of orders taken for February 14 that include an accompanying "I love you" note has declined from about 80% several years ago to about 50% today. Maybe the situation is best summed up by a recreational therapist from Michigan, who said: "I take things slower in relationships. The last thing you want to do is use the "L" word and scare anybody."
The "L" word? What's going on here? Are people today are so alienated from themselves and each other that they are unwilling even to confess their need for love? Maybe that's why Teresa Garpstas and Robert LeGalley filed an unusual prenuptial agreement--notarized, nonetheless--before they were married several years ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In their prenup, they agree on many elements of their life together. For example, they agree to each receive an allowance of $70 per week to cover haircuts, eating out, gifts for friends, and spending money. They also agree to spend $5 for birthday gifts to nieces and nephews, to send each of their parents only a card on their birthdays, but to spend between $30 and $120 for their parents' Christmas presents.
The section of the agreement titled "Sex and Child Care" is equally specific. "We will engage in healthy sex three to five times per week. Teresa will stay on birth control for two years after we are married and then will try to get pregnant. When both of us are working, Teresa can have only one child. When one parent is free, Teresa can have another child. When both of us are free, Teresa can have one more child. After the third pregnancy we will both get sterilized."
I find the section on "Personal Conduct" even more amusing. "On weekdays, we will turn out the lights by 11:30 p.m. and wake up at 6:30 a.m." This was obviously before they had any kids. "When driving," the agreement continues, "we will stay one car length away from other cars for every 10 mph. We will buy supreme unleaded fuel (Chevron) and won't let the fuel gauge get lower than half a tank." The agreement concludes with a statement whose irony must surely have been lost on these two well-meaning but naive human beings: "We will provide unconditional love and fulfill each other's basic needs." If only it were that easy.
But it's not. Relationships-especially intimate ones--are profoundly difficult to establish and maintain, and I give Teresa and Robert full credit for recognizing that fact. But is this what we are talking about when we talk about love: Chevron gas and haircut money? Is "Call me and we'll do that talk thing" the most heartfelt expression we can muster up? The situation reminds me a story told in Plato's Symposium.
Once upon a time, the tale goes, there were three sexes: man, woman, and an androgynous creature that was like a man and a woman stuck together back to back, with four hands and four feet. It also had one head with two faces looking opposite ways, four ears, and a matched set of reproductive organs. You get the picture. This creature could either walk upright--backwards or forwards as it pleased--or it could roll over and over at great speed, turning on its four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with legs in the air.
In addition to being fast and powerful, this third sex was also ambitious: once it dared to scale heaven and make an attack upon the gods. Doubt and consternation reigned in the celestial councils. If the gods annihilated the race with thunderbolts, as they had done with the giants, then there would be an end to the sacrifices and worship offered as well. On the other hand, the gods could not suffer this insolence to go unrestrained.
After a great deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way to solve the problem. He said: "I will cut these creatures in two, and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them even more profitable to us." After each double creature was cut in half, however, the two parts still wanted to be together, each desiring the other half, longing to grow into one once again. Which explains why we run around in such a frenzy: we're looking for our other half, as it were.
If it's true that the desire for connection and relationship is as old as time and as deep as human nature--surely the point of the tale--then why are people today so commitment averse? Why is the number of long-term relationships falling instead of rising?
Maybe it's because, to use the language adopted by Gertrude Himmelfarb in her book The De-Moralization of Society, we have lost our sense of love as a virtue--an ideal toward which we strive. The passage from Corinthians we read responsively at the outset of the service certainly speaks to love as an ideal. So does Shakespeare, in a sonnet that is perhaps the most familiar of all disquisitions on love:
It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
But even if we believe in a love like that, how do we then live? Gertrude Himmelfarb would say that our quandary results from treating love not as a virtue, but as a value--not as an overarching ideal toward which we strive, but as a subjective custom or convention, relative to our place and time, employed for instrumental, utilitarian purposes. This shift in our moral perspective, by the way, was designed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s. His proclamation of the death of god and the resulting rise of relativism meant there would be no good and evil, no virtue and vice. There would be only values, useful ideas for maintaining or promoting certain results. Consider the present-day focus on family values. As you well know, family values are not about virtues like love and hope and faith; they are mostly about maintaining the convention of husband, wife and 2.3 kids.
Back to the question: how do we live if we believe love is a virtue? Love's Labor's Lost has been one of Shakespeare's least successful comedies, perhaps in part because Shakespeare himself said it wasn't very good. But it gets one thing exactly right: it portrays what happens when love is a virtue.
In case you are not familiar with the play, it seems that King Ferdinand of Spain invited three of his friends to come live with him at the court for three years of self improvement, during which time they would devote themselves solely to study and contemplation. But they had to agree never to see, speak to, or be with a woman during those three years, fast once a week, and sleep only three hours per night, all in order to be more fit for concentrating. Their discipline lasts only a brief time--until the Princess of France arrives with three of her ladies on a diplomatic mission. Much comedy derives from the men's embarrassed attempts to conceal from one another that they are falling in love, and from the ladies' disguising themselves and switching identities when the men, themselves disguised as Russians, come to woo them.
In the end, of course, all confess to love and agree to marry. But first, the women require that each of the four men spend one additional year in virtuous labor either at a hermitage, in a hospital, or in study. The play concludes with these words:
Berowne: Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
King: Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.
Berowne: That's too long for a play.
It may indeed be too long for a play, but that's the point. Love is a labor, and it's never done. It is an ever fixed mark toward which we strive, a star that gives direction to every wondering bark. Love is the timeless virtue of being patient and kind. Think about asking this question in the various situations that make up your day: "What's the loving thing to do here--not the useful thing or the efficient thing, but the loving thing?"
Anna Quindlen said the same thing in a different way in a commencement address last year at Villanova University:
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good. Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.
So here's what I wanted to tell you today: get a life. A real lifea life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad.
Love is both an ideal and a course of action. It's a way of believing and a way of life. In the end, love is a labor that can be either lost or won.
I received an e-mail the other day from a cousin of mine. He and I were the best of friends for a decade during my late teens and twenties. We were closer than brothers. We worked together, played together, made music together, even lived together for a couple of years. Then we had a major falling out when I left the Mennonite Church in the mid-eighties. I haven't seen or spoken to him since. And then the e-mail arrived.
What's the possibility of breakfast, lunch or supper sometime? We can meet halfway. I can assure you I have no hidden agenda. I would just like to see you again... especially when I think about the fact that for much of a ten-year block of time I would have considered you my best friend and now... I haven't seen you in over 12 years, I have 3 kids you have never met and I have no idea where you even live. No pressure. I would enjoy hearing from you.
That e-mail is one of love's labors. I felt both guilty and relieved that it was initially someone else's labor and not mine. But now it's my turn to do the work. So I'll show up. We'll listen and talk. Maybe we'll even laugh together. It's love's labor, you see, an attempt to reach out and make a connection that matters. Something may even be won, for him and me, for our children and people we love. It's worth taking the chance. It's always worth taking the chance. Copyright AllSouls, 2000.