What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I was in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago for my sister-in-law’s wedding. She’s been a widow for several years and has found a good man who had lost his wife and was lonely, too. At our ages, love is a little different than it was when we were young, and since the wedding was at a Vegas senior center, I guess it was natural that Tina Turner’s mega hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” kept running through my mind. (In a moment of distressing irony, Turner died in the past few days. Perhaps she was broadcasting to my brain from Heaven?) Turner sings, “What’s love but a secondhand emotion? What’s love but an old-fashioned notion?” I never really appreciated those lyrics when I was young, but lately they’ve started to make more sense to me.

In my mid-thirties I had a dear friend down the street whose fifth pregnancy triggered a family genetic weakness. She became critically ill and was rushed to the hospital. Overnight her husband  became both mom and dad by default. When the baby (a girl) was born, her mother was still confined to the hospital for several weeks after the newborn came home, so her dad slept with the bassinet next to his bed, waking every 3 or 4 hours to feed and change the infant, walking the floor with her when she fought sleep, and then crawling out of bed at dawn to get the other kids up and to school before he left for work. For several long months family and friends stepped in to help with the baby while her mother was physically unable to care for the beautiful little girl. My friend was so ill, at one time she believed there was a strong possibility she might die, so she entrusted me with a letter to her children about how much she loved them should her vision of the future become an inevitability. (I was happy to deliver that unopened letter to one of her adult children many years later.)

I remember both my concern and admiration for her husband as he somehow found the strength to juggle family and work over several years until his wife’s illness was somewhat under control, and she could again step in to share part of load of for five children under eight or nine years old. He once confided in me that many nights when he held the baby as she cried, he wondered if he had the strength to face another day. But he did. Over and over again. It was during the darkness of those long nights as his other children slept that he began to understand “what’s love got to do with it?”

In college when I dated and fell in “love” with my husband, I was ecstatic–love seemed to come floating in the door to me. It felt kind of effortless. I just sort of showed up, and there in front of me was a person who seemed to want to cater to my every need. That lasted about six months. Then marriage and kids and life with all its troubles shattered the fairy tale bubble. And, though our relationship didn’t involve any serious or life-threatening issues, I slowly realized I wasn’t happy at all. I was pretty sure it was my husband’s fault.

So, as the serious believer in education I had always been, I began to study. I read books on effective marriages; I convinced my husband to take several marriage improvement community school classes with me; I even enlisted our kids in schemes to help make dad happier so that all of us could be happier, too. We just kept struggling along, partly because of my husband’s overarching insistence that whoever filed for divorce had to take the kids. All eight of them.

Then one desperate afternoon when I was convinced that there wasn’t a single sign that my husband even noticed me, much less cared about me anymore, I received a clear message from Heaven. Stay. Stay. It was not a message I wanted to hear.

I thought long and hard about that message. Finally, I accepted the fact that if Heaven thought my marriage was important enough to hold it together, there must be a reason. So I began to search. To be honest, what I found surprised and humbled me: I discovered that marriage is about love. Not his love. Mine.

Love is a choice. There are dozens of little irritations everyday between people who have different histories, different perspectives, and different DNA—friction may be an inevitable result. No relationship just glides along a smooth path without resistance. Love is the choice not to give up or give in. Sometimes the requirements of love are so heavy that we can only commit to the moment immediately ahead of us. But love makes that choice anyway. My husband and I have been married 54 years now. Most of that time, we’ve been making a new choice every day.

My sister-in-law, whose wedding I attended last month, is 74. Her new husband is 81. Because of their ages, it’s certain that both of them will have to face difficult issues of health ahead. And one will face the loss of a spouse for a second time. They are not starry-eyed young lovers. But like my husband and I, they are old enough to understand “What’s love got to do with it?” Everything.