Love Stories
Author’s Note: Last month I had the honor of doing something for two of my friends that I never expected I would do for anyone. But when you’ve had a best friend since you were 10 years old, you say yes. And you do your best to write them something wonderful. This week’s writing is adapted from what I wrote for the two of them.
In This Is Water, author David Foster Wallace starts with a story about fish. I won’t go into details of the story, but the point of it is “merely that the most obvious, important realities in life are often the ones that are hardest to see.”
When we tell our stories we tend to focus on the big moments, the milestones in our lives. But if we’re honest about it, we can admit that so much of life is repetitive, mundane, and maybe even a little boring at times. And, if we’re honest, we know that we have very little control over most things in life. But, we do control what we think, how we see things, and what we focus on. For all the things we don’t control, we do control our perspectives.
We get to choose how we construct meaning from the repetitive, petty, even frustrating things that happen every day. The truth is that we decide what’s important and what kind of meaning we bring to our lives. How we choose to see the world; that’s a really important kind of freedom we each have. “This really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad little unsexy ways, every day.”
In that attention and effort, in the countless unsexy things we do for the people we care about, we find the most beautiful things in life. It’s there that we find love, and the other few things that make live worth living. It’s there that our days and our stories become colorful.
In a letter of advice to his son, author John Steinbeck defines two kinds of love. He writes that one kind is selfish. Selfish love can be ugly and crippling; it can make you sick, small, and weak. But the other kind, the good kind of love “is an outpouring of everything good in you; of kindness and consideration and respect, it’s recognition of another person as unique and valuable.” It’s good love, great love really, that “can release you in strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”
He says that that kind of love is “about the best thing that can happen to anyone” so not to let anyone make it small or light. This good kind of love, love that builds you up and makes you stronger, is what all the best stories tell us about. It’s this kind of love, and our journeys to find it that fill the books we read, the music we listen to, and the movies we watch.
When we tell our love stories, we tend to focus on sharing the most cinematic moments. The moments in a love story when you both knew that you wanted to build a future together. We share the day of the proposal, and the day of the wedding. It’s these moments we remember as pivotal, important.
We share stories of the moment we first met, or the time we reconnected when everything started to change for us. We talk of these moments, but really, we can only feel the importance of them when we look at them in retrospect. When they happened, they were likely ordinary and mundane. It’s only after we start to dream about the future together that we can recognize that these moments were special.
When we tell our love stories, it’s these moments we talk about. The big moments, and the grand gestures. Often it’s the greatness in these moments that feel worthy of sharing with others. But, if you think about it, these moments only tell a small part of a love story. They are like reading only a few random pages of the whole book.
Rarely do we talk about the rest of the story. Rarely do we take the time to recognize the small, the mundane moments of love for the beauty they hold. There would be no grand cinematic moments without the everyday, ordinary moments that happen in between. It’s these little moments that grow and nurture a love strong enough to build a future together. The truth is that there would be no love stories without all the time spent living in the less glamorous moments.
Great love happens because of the ordinary, little unsexy things we do, every day for the person we care most about. It happens because we want to do the dishes, only so that the person we love doesn’t have to them. When we watch a movie that we don’t even like, because we love that it makes them laugh. It happens when we are excited to go exploring in the forest, with complete trust that the person we love will help us find the trail. It happens when you see adventure in both the unknown and the ordinary.
So, what should you do when you find yourself in love? Steinbeck says to “glory in it for one thing, and be very glad and grateful for it. Try to live up to it.” Because love is the best and most beautiful thing that can happen to anyone.
End Note: In preparing this piece, I read David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water and a letter John Steinbeck had written to his son about love numerous times. I have done my best to give them credit for their ideas, but if you think I missed a reference as you read, please credit them for the idea instead of me.
