On Love

]Friends!

When you are reading this I am either preparing for or in the midst of the happiest, proudest and most significant “job” of my life. For the fourth time in a few years, Jessica and I will be walking a daughter or son down the aisle. This time we will celebrate Rosanna and Johnny’s union. As any parent will know, experiencing your children’s happiness and witnessing them arriving in their “home” from where they can continue to build the kind of life they dream of feels to me like the icing of the cake of life.

Finding your life partner is the most important decision we make. If you don’t believe me, please watch Robert Waldinger’s talk below. It’s the longest happiness study ever made and the net net of all those years of research is loud and clear. The quality of your relationships is by far the single most important contributor to what we all want out of a good life. Particularly the ONE relationship.

Like so many around us, we had to be creative, flexible, and open-minded to even have a wedding this weekend. It will be an unusual one for sure. With fewer people attending live and more people attending virtually. I have been joking with Rosanna and Johnny that this might have been a test in and of itself for a future life together. Or as I often say: How do you make God laugh? Share your detailed plans for the future.

So this has afforded us some practice in fast feet, positive attitude, and respect for many different preferences. I am optimistic about Johnny and Rosannas’s future together as they clearly have demonstrated that they are much more interested in being married than getting married.

So what is love really? Is there anything else that has created more music, drama, books, or art? I doubt it. Love is powerful. It’s also sometimes elusive and also evasive. Asymptotic even. You lose it when you have it only to find it back again. There are also so many flavors, spices, attitudes and feelings associated with love. It makes you cry. It makes you angry. It makes you laugh. It helps you feel pride. It makes you bond and cement a sense of belonging. Love makes you feel safe and when you feel it waning you feel threatened. COMPLICATED!

In my 30s I was fortunate to read Scott M Peck’s incredible book The Road Less Traveled. It changed my perspective on life in a few key important areas. First, on love. What love truly is. Second, on responsibility and what our “job” here on earth really is. And third, on delayed gratification and the importance of living life backward. All your choices are like compounding interest and they accumulate over time and hence instant happiness, while attractive in the moment, rarely leads to long term joy. His definition of love made an indelible mark on me.

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

Scott M Peck - The Road Less Traveled

Another source of influence on the topic of Love has been the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. His beautiful poem was a big “lesson” for me as I grappled with leadership challenges early in my career. Sometimes (perhaps more often than we’d like to admit) we get frustrated when people don’t do what WE “want”. When they don’t “listen” or when we don’t understand how they can’t understand. Here is his poem

If One Is Truly to Succeed in Leading a Person to a Specific Place, One Must First and Foremost Take Care to Find Him Where He is and Begin There.

This is the secret in the entire art of helping. Anyone who cannot do this is himself under a delusion if he thinks he is able to help someone else.

In order truly to help someone else, I must understand more than he–but certainly first and foremost understand what he understands.

If I do not do that, then my greater understanding does not help him at all.

If I nevertheless want to assert my greater understanding, then it is because I am vain or proud, then basically instead of benefiting him I really want to be admired by him.

But all true helping begins with a humbling.

The helper must first humble himself under the person he wants to help and thereby understand that to help is not to dominate but to serve, that to help is a not to be the most dominating but the most patient, that to help is a willingness for the time being to put up with being in the wrong and not understanding what the other understands.

I think “help” here is synonymous with love. Love is a verb. To love. Love the feeling is a product of love the verb. Love is at its core being as happy with someone else’s happiness as you are with your own. And therefore as willing to invest in, celebrate and support it as you are in investing in your own. It’s important to recognize that you must be willing and able to also love yourself. It’s really hard to love others if you don’t love your self. So “helping” and “loving” very much applies both to you and to others. This is why self-care, self-awareness, meditation, silence, and other forms of habits that help us be more centered, grounded, and aware are important investments in the arena of love.

When we find true love it is a remarkable gift. It completes us. It helps us “shift” from our prior circumstance where we might have felt a sense of primary belonging to a family, to a profession, to a sports team or to a group of friends. All good things indeed. But not like losing yourself in someone else. When that shift happens, the other person becomes your center of gravity, center of your universe. Some parents admit to this being a moment of mixed emotions. Some sense of “loss”. We talk about “giving your daughter/son away”. I don’t find any loss here at all. Only gain. Only happiness. Only joy. Of course, getting old has other problems which I might get into in some other blog and we might have some attribution problems here confusing symptoms and causes. But to me, witnessing my children lose themselves in another is nothing but beautiful and makes me totally happy. I love them fully and completely in both a Scott Peck and Kierkegaardian way and hence their happiness is therefore mine.

One of the more beautiful poems of love I have read is from the Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran 1923

I’ll end with the Swedish singer/poet Thomas DiLeva who once said.

There is only one race. The human race. And there is only one religion. Love.

Amen to that.

Below is the aforementioned TEDx talk by our good friend Robert Waldinger plus some of the schmaltziest (and my favorite) expressions of love from the movies. Just a few. To get you in the right love mood!

Until next week.

I love you!

From a happy, loving father of the bride this August 9th 2020