I once overheard an older woman talking to her co-worker on our commuter bus. She was in her fifties, which seemed old to me at the time, and I knew she had been divorced twice. She vehemently declared that there was no such thing as love and her friend agreed with her. I was tempted to interject a question, asking what kind of love she meant, but I didn’t want her to know I was listening. Nevertheless, I think I know the kind of love she meant. She was referring to love between two people that lasts through better or worse, like the vow many couples take during a wedding ceremony. Her complaint resounded from personal experience and the testimony of many other people who have felt the pain of false commitment.
Commitment is a word not often used in our society unless it refers to a term of imprisonment. And ironically, its use there is inappropriate since prisoners rarely serve the stated length of their incarceration. In many respects our society lacks commitment in word and deed. It is no wonder that half of all marriages fail after a period of time because one or both partners want out. This isn’t new to human society but in the past, social constraints were applied to prevent divorce, sometimes harshly. For example, the Catholic Church would excommunicate a divorcee or the marketplace would deny them work. But these constraints have largely been removed in our society today so the full impact of human unfaithfulness is observed. Advances in birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted disease have also contributed to lifestyles that promote waywardness, giving rise to concrete reasons for separation from a partner who was supposed to be with you for a lifetime.
Has all of this happened because there’s no such thing as love? Is the driving force for personal relationships fundamentally self-interest, with love being an expected façade? Is there any affection that lasts a lifetime?
These questions have disappointing answers if we consider ourselves to be merely animals with a higher intellect than most species. From this frame of reference, we are just like dogs who would kill and eat other dogs to survive. We are offended by this comparison because we have been schooled to think and behave better than that, and many of us do. But without that schooling, what would we be? It is an established fact that rogue elephants have one thing in common, the lack of an adult male when they were growing up. Could we expect to do better if we are just animals? In our society today, one in four young people are being raised by a single parent, evidence of no commitment in their mate. But this statistic is also evidence of something else, faithfulness of the parent who remains with their offspring.
If you want to know if love exists, look at that person. They could leave their children and the state would take care of them but they don’t. Why is that? I submit it is because of love, the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.
Look at other species whose parents will go to an extreme and die to protect their young. A naturalist might say this behavior is innate, evolving from random mutations, but however it occurs, it is there. Love does exist and for some species, parents stay together for their lifetime. We tell ourselves that we are better than the eclectus parrot, for example, who chooses one mate for life, but in terms of commitment, we really aren’t. At least we aren’t like the female praying mantis, who kills her mate after conception. We allow our mate to live after divorce. So, the human species is somewhere between these extremes because some of us have commitment to our spouse and some don’t. For those who do, it is a matter of obeying our will and not our feelings. We have been taught to do this because there is nothing innate in our genetics that overrules our feelings. Without instruction to the contrary, feelings are what governs animals.
Where did we get this teaching? It certainly didn’t evolve! It is hard enough to explain our advanced intellect, much less a deviant path from evolution. No, the teaching that our will supersedes our emotion is external to the physical world. As a Christian, I would say it comes from the spiritual world and is independent of man’s existence in his society or habitat. In this sense, it is absolute knowledge, having no dependence on anything corporal and nothing in this world can prove it wrong or explain its origin. It is against the nature of man and is the foundation for commitment and love.
If man is taught to obey his will instead of feelings, commitment will result and from commitment, love will be demonstrated. Therefore, where love exists, an external influence has occurred.
But it isn’t an experience for everyone. The lady on the bus didn’t have it and neither did others like her. The whys and wherefores of that are for another time. For now, it can be said that love exists in some people and is proof of instruction that is out of this world. As an obvious corollary, where love is absent, people haven’t been listening to the teacher with obedience in mind. As a father once told his daughter, in order to be loved, you must first be willing to give it, and with most people that requires an exercise of their will.
