Who Do You Lo-v-v-v-ve... And Why

Much as I've had George Thorogood shrieking this refrain in my head for days now (oh that sleep deprivation is so much fun), this is not a blog about late twentieth-century rock and roll. This is a blog about what it means to love.

A close relative and I got into a bicker recently. There's always been a sort of rivalry for attention between her and another of my close family relatives. She said, "You love her. You have to love her. She's family."

To which I responded -- and I was tired and frustrated at the time -- and therefore less apt to spare feelings, "You don't HAVE TO love anybody. You can care for somebody without loving them."

As much as that might offend some people and much as that might have surprised her into silence, which was, at that moment, a relief-let-me-tell-you, I'm going to stand by that statement. Nobody has to -- nobody is obligated to -- love anyone else. Even family.

I think the thing that made her go silent at that moment was the not-so-coincidental fact that I was caring for her, since she was approaching the end stages of a terminal disease and making it very difficult all around for all of us who had to tend her. So that left open the very real possibility that I might be tending her, but not necessarily out of love.

In the midst of taking care of everything that went along with her dying, I was still working, and the project I had to edit was a particularly shallow romance novel. The characters were thrown together, barely spoke, then awkwardly made love and improbably lived happily ever after. Their secrets were revealed in the narrative but never to each other, and their conversations were kept to a bare bit of snarls and glib replies, but somehow she realized he was a man of strength and caring and he realized she was kind and giving and ....

Oh, who knows. The thing was...all tell, no show. No depth.

So I started thinking about love, and what constitutes love, and what authors should strive to do and by extension real people should hope enters their lives -- and why it's important to recognize and grab hold of and never take for granted.

Love -- love is when someone tells you something they admire or think is great about you without adding "but...". Love is when you can see someone at their worst, know them well enough to realize they can also be dazzling -- and they see the same in you. Love is when you can be together and be silent and comfortable in that quiet, when it's just a matter of holding a hand or saying something intimate or funny or sympathetic. Love is getting each other -- it's about communicating, and not necessarily by talking everything to death. Love is about forgiveness when the other person's being a total pain in the ass, because you know maybe sometimes you are, too.

And it's about listening. About reassurance and discovery and growing together. And valuing that relationship and respecting it. There is no trouncing on feelings or physical or emotional abuse in real love; there's no need to separate the one you love from others or trying to outdo them if they earn more money or draw better pictures or make a better cheeseburger.

We've all seen, or some of us have even experienced -- relationships where people tolerated horrible treatment because they thought it was love, and they thought they had to stay and take it. Sometimes because they thought they would never meet anyone else, or because that person was "family", or because they thought that was the way it's supposed to be when you're in love. It isn't. It really isn't.

So when you write love, you need to be sure your characters show -- in their words, gestures, actions -- what it means to love. Make them sensitive, strong, full of heart. Don't make them cruel, or let them forget to develop their feelings. Let them show them, grow from the foundation that you start with that initial connection, that reason for coming together and maybe staying that way.

And try, really try, to do that in your own life. Seek it out, love with all you've got and value those who treat you with love. Forgive if you can, but remember your own worth, too -- love makes you happy, tender, ever-changing -- but it also gives you strength you might never have realized you had. It grows. It holds but never binds. It lifts you up and fills you near to bursting at the best, and even the worst, of times.