Last time, we talked about the first characteristic, ownership. This week, we discuss the most mentioned characteristic, love. Everyone talks about love, everyone says it to each other, but does anyone really know what it means?

In marriage, love is the opportunity to expand life’s meaningfulness beyond ourselves to decisively and selflessly support and protect one another. Love offers us the power to give for free, for fun, and without expectations. When we are in love, we know and understand each other enough to see clearly why, of course, they feel as they do, think how they think. We understand that they have wants and needs and dreams and aspirations they express.

What they need and feel and think may not be what you need and feel and think. Their dreams and aspirations may not be your dreams or aspirations. It is enough to us, however, that they are those things, in those ways, that make them who they are, uniquely how they are in all that we know and understand and protect. Love, without understanding, is empty. Our love sees and holds the one we love; it holds onto who our spouse is so that we can understand when factors are distorting their current words or behavior. These distortions might be caused by fatigue or stress or chemistry or fears or insert any of a dozen possible factors here.

We can’t be “nagged” or “bullied” or “victims” of the one we love. Instead, we must be compassionate for the pain that the one we love must be experiencing when they act in ways incongruent with who they are. Love understands regardless of whether we agree or not. Our commitment to love each other frees us from the limited narrowness of “me:” MY insecurities, MY hurts, MY lack or fairness or justice to which I’M entitled.

When two make this commitment to themselves in the witness of the other, when two choose to love the other so selflessly, the trust in mutual reliance becomes magical. One plus one becomes fourteen thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight!

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