Two and a half years ago, I married my best friend. I thought at the time that our wedding day would be the peak of our love. My heart was bursting with love for this man, and I didn't think it was possible to love him more than I did on that day. In fact, I feared the months and years after our honeymoon, when our delight in each other would surely wear off and normal life would leave us apathetic to the love we once shared. But I was so wrong. Instead of fading, our love grew deeper. I was in awe of our intense connection and the gladness in my soul that bubbled up again and again as we grew closer. But alongside our growing love, sprang up something unwanted and surprising: hurt and pain. And in its wake, we were both left confused and disoriented. How could the two of us, who loved each other more than we even thought possible, be capable of hurting each other so profoundly? And how could we be expected to respond to the pain with love, when that is the last thing that we would naturally offer up? This Valentine's Day, I am reflecting on how I've learned that it is not only possible for love to break your heart, as CS Lewis says, but when it happens, it is actually quite beautiful.
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. --CS Lewis The Four Loves
Love is a risk. I'd heard that before I got married. I thought I understood it. But I believed risk to mean "possibility". I thought love was a calculated risk in that if you were careful with your heart while you were dating, and if you married the right person, he wouldn't hurt you. Three months into our marriage I thought I'd married the wrong person because I didn't realize that the risk of getting hurt was a guarantee when you love someone. I thought real heart break was only supposed to come when a dating relationship ended badly...and that was okay because it was in an effort to find the love of your life who wouldn't leave you and who wouldn't ever break your heart. I thought I had been stupid and ignorant to have married this man who was hurting me so deeply, and I thought that marriage must have changed me into a horrible person because I was hurting him in ways I'd never imagined I would!
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
I read the love chapter in the Bible and concluded that love was foolish. Hurt apparently was inevitable, and I was supposed to love back? I wasn't supposed to keep a record of wrongs? When someone hurts you, it doesn't make sense "to protect, to trust, to hope, to persevere". It's painful to respond with love when you are hurt. Yet, that is what these verses were telling me to do. Therefore, love seemed to be inextricably linked to pain. (As CS Lewis had already discovered.) And my conclusion was that this kind of love was stupid and ignorant because who wants to continually subject themselves to that kind of pain? Wasn't "bearing all things" another way of saying, "letting yourself get walked all over"?
"Love never gives up," The Message version reads, "It puts up with anything." Isn't this passage assuming there are painful things that must be "put up with"? If there were no "wrongs", we wouldn't need to be instructed to not keep track of them. This passage seems to assume that when you love someone, they are going to hurt you.
So maybe love is only stupid and ignorant and naive if we are surprised by the hurt. Maybe that's what distinguishes young love from seasoned love. Maybe young love only anticipates the benefits it brings, only focuses on how easy it feels to love the other person. Maybe young love knows about the risks, having been warned by premarital counseling or an awareness of the divorce rate, but doesn't truly understand that when you promise to love someone you are promising to love them even when they hurt you. It's the "for worse" part of the marriage vows that seasoned love must know about through experience. It must know that there is not only a risk of your heart being broken, but a guarantee. It must know that giving your heart to another human being is like giving a delicate glass object to a child. It will break. Who knows when or how often or how painful it will be, but it will happen.
Is that why the divorce rate is so high, because young love is always shocked by the hurt it wasn't expecting? Is that why newlyweds don't understand why the divorce rate is so high, and they think that it will never happen to them until their hearts are broken into so many pieces they're not even sure getting out of the relationship would be enough to mend them?
So love is a risk. It is a guarantee you will be hurt. And it seems that the deeper you love, the deeper you risk being wounded. But love perseveres. Love always hopes. Love never gives up. That is real love. And that is the real love we are called to give each other even when we are hurt over and over again. That is the love Jesus showed those who hurt him over and over. And it is only Jesus who could compel me to believe that we must love those who hurt us, and that we also must forgive them, again and again. In Matthew 18:22 he tells his disciples that they must not only forgive someone seven times (like the common Jewish practice of the day), but seventy-seven times, or in other translations, seventy times seven...not specifically meaning 490 times, but rather an infinite number of times. But what is forgiveness?
"Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death."
-Timothy Keller A Reason For God
In the two and a half years we have been married, Jordan and I have hurt each other in ways we didn't realize we would. It's taken time and wise words from trusted friends to realize that this is a normal part of love. We are invited, not only to love each other despite the hurt, but to offer forgiveness. It is not my natural instinct, and it does not feel good at first, in fact, it hurts. But it does lead to freedom and deepens real love. It's a chance to show and receive forgiveness beyond what we both deserve. Loving Jordan despite the guarantee that he will hurt me is my chance to practice loving someone the way Jesus loves me. What a privilege. What an opportunity.
So, we have a choice. We can, like CS Lewis suggests, become impenetrable coffins. We can harden our hearts so they are no longer capable of love, but are fortified against the pain that will surely break them. Or, we can love anyway, despite the hurt, risking the deepest parts of us. Foolishly and knowingly subjecting ourselves to pain and heart-break, but also becoming part of something so much larger and more meaningful than ourselves. Loving and forgiving another person despite the hurt that we sometimes feel; allowing another person to experience the most glorious and truest kind of love there is; and freely giving this love that will cost us our hearts, while trusting that the One who has forgiven us and loves us completely will put the pieces of our broken hearts back together again...it is the greatest gift we can give someone. And it's a gift that each of us has also been given. All we have to do is accept it.
Love never gives up.
Loves cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Take pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going till the end.
Love never dies.
-The Message
