Encouraging Words: If You Miss Love

If You Miss Love

Recently I looked in my underwear drawer and there was that pair of underwear. You know the ones, those “what was I thinking when I bought those” pair. I guess everyone has at least one pair. Ladies probably have more than the guys, due at least in part to their husbands. Recently, in a store I saw a pair of men’s camouflage bikinis. Where do they think that camouflage is going to be effective? I can’t imagine it fooling the deer or your dear. Most of what’s associated with the lingerie business is connected with another emotion rather than love.

Being Valentines Day, I thought about all the things we call love and what we go through to achieve love and intimacy. The question, what is love, began to slowly meander through my mind. There is love for our family, love for our country, and even love for the things we possess, especially our pets. Mostly when we think about love we think about romantic love. The Greeks called it eros. There is a place for eros because life would be much less without it. I certainly would not want to do away with it.

But there is a higher love called agape. Most Christians would immediately say, that’s God’s love, and they would be correct. But humanly speaking, there is another dimension to that love we need to recognize, because it is a love based on our will, not on our emotions. When you love someone with agape, you do not “fall in love” with him or her, you make a decision to love them. I look at older couples who have been together for 50 or 60 years and I know they probably started with eros, but at some point they developed agape for one another. You see agape makes you stay with a person when they have grown old and are no longer the person you married. That’s why women, still attractive, continue to love a husband who is balding and has furniture disease (their chest has fallen into their drawers). And men, who are now distinguished because of their gray hair, continue to love that gray-headed old woman whose figure is now bell shaped instead of an hourglass. That’s why my father, liks so many other spouses, continued to care for and love my mother after she could no longer return his love or carry on a rational conversation.

Love is funny and it will make you do funny things. It made me get married. Why in the world would any man want to get married? I’m sure that social scientists, anthropologists, psychologists and the like can give you some hard facts to explain why we do, but let me give you a layman’s reason. Most men marry because without a partner, something is missing in their life. There is a basic incompleteness. That does not mean those who have chosen to be single are incomplete, however people are designed to live in relationships. As Leo Buscaglia said, “If you miss love, you miss life.”