Loving Someone....

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This is part of an email that I sent Uncle Ben in July of 2004:

Things are a bit different around here. I moved over to my father’s house the beginning of May. It wasn’t an easy decision, to say the least. Joy was upset and didn’t want me to move. I had thought about it for a long time and felt it was best. I still care for her, but I didn’t feel we felt the way we should about each other.


This is part of Uncle Ben's email response:

Your comments on "feeling" in your relationship, I think, need to be examined a little. Emotions are certainly a part of "love" – too much in our culture; but there is more to it than that. Love is a matter of the will – as in the two Great Commandments: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your being, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Feelings will come and go depending on a lot of things, but they are an uncertain measurement for an inquiry into the foundations of marriage, and the living out of it year in and year out.


Uncle Ben offered to help in any way he could, but I was too embarrassed about failing in my marriage (the first person in my family to do so) to ever accept his offer.

I often wondered what words of wisdom Uncle Ben might have given me; he passed away in 2006.

Perhaps the results of my internet search on the topic (“Is love a feeling or a commitment?”) include information similar to what Uncle Ben might have shared with me.

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Loving Someone Without Feeling It

Are married couples supposed to always feel in love? James Dobson, Ph.D. provides the answer.

Is It Possible to Love Someone and Not Feel It?

It certainly is — because love is more than a feeling. It is primarily a decision. Married couples who misunderstand this point will have serious problems when the feeling of love disappears for a time.

Couples who genuinely love each other will experience times of closeness, times when they feel apathetic, and times when they are irritated and cranky. That's just the way emotions operate.
What, then, will hold them steady as feelings bounce all over the landscape? The source of constancy is a commitment of the will. You simply make up your mind not to be blown off the limb by fluctuating and unreliable emotions.

This is probably what Uncle Ben was referring to in his email to me.

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Is love a feeling or a commitment?

People change. Feelings change. Circumstances change. To promise to love someone forever is not a realistic promise.

It's a common definition of love – something you feel, something you might stop feeling if your heart were to change. It's a vision of love as a feather that can be blown by the wind, always landing softly. It's cute, and a lot of people believe it – probably because Hollywood has foisted it upon us many times in many different movies and TV shows. It's a flighty definition of love that is very convenient for the one taking flight.

However, that is countered by someone else who outlined a simple but powerful change in thinking. Some of us believe that love is an action, not an emotion. As such, we don't necessarily believe such things are impossible to achieve.

That's the awesomeness, right there. You want to know how to make your marriage last? That's it. Stop thinking that love is that feeling of butterflies in your tummy. Stop thinking that love is that giddy feeling of attraction. Start thinking that love is about respect, commitment, loyalty, and the deliberate choice to move past negative emotions that might pull things apart. Love is not about fair weather relationships. It's about weathering storms together.

This makes sense. When I think about my parents or my sons, there were times when I was disappointed or angry at them, but I never thought of NOT loving them.

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A couple breaking the promise of marriage or a parent breaking a promise to their son or daughter is really no different.

Marriage is a tad different, in that the things that are promised ("vowed," which is a word we don't hear often enough without irony) are impossible to promise. You may say you will love, cherish, and respect another until the day you die, but you are not promising something you can, in good faith, honestly know you can deliver.

People change. Feelings change. Circumstances change. To promise to love someone forever is not a realistic promise. You can promise to try. But you can't promise you will. – at least, not with any real certainty.

I do wish there were a code of honor these days, but there isn't. Instead, misinformation, lies, and manipulation are the norm in politics and business. So, why shouldn't it be the norm in our day-to-day lives, as well?

It SHOULD be the norm. We can only control our own actions.

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Some of us believe the love is an action, not an emotion.

Very well put. One thing that struck me after studying German for a while is that, much like "sit" and "set" or "lie" and "lay" are intransitive/transitive verb pairs differentiated by the central vowel ("sitzen" and "setzen" / "liegen" and "legen" in the German), so too are "live" and "love" ("leben" and "lieben") – "love" is the transitive form of "live". So in that sense, loving someone is helping them live well, helping them grow and be healthy. Romance doesn't have to enter into this picture, which is why you can just as well love your siblings even despite a very rocky growing up. Which is also why I know that I'm loving my wife the most not when I'm feeling all lovey-dovey, but when she's annoying the crap out of me or I'm really angry at her, but still try my hardest to make things work.

Love is work. Marriage is work. And the truer measure of how much you love your partner/spouse doesn't happen during the easy times – it's how you behave and how you work at it during the rough times, even if you happen to hate each right at that moment. That's when you fulfill whatever promises or vows you've made.

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All of these perspectives of "love" are similar in that they focus on commitment and choice rather than feelings. They point out that feelings (which can be fickle and which we have no control over) change and fluctuate. Commitment to honor vows or promises is something each person can choose to control. It still takes both people in a relationship to work together (through communication and action) for that relationship to continue, but it is comforting to realize that my loving relationship is not at the mercy of feelings alone.

I believe this is what Uncle Ben was referring to in his email and what he would have explained to me had I given him the opportunity.
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