When I was twenty-two, I wrote some notes about love . My reasoning went more or less like this: two years ago I was in love with A, a year ago with B, and today I like C. If one person can so easily give way to another, perhaps I am not yet talking about love, but about my need to love or to feel in love.
As a young man, this thought helped me face a number of rejections. Feeling something for someone does not mean that love truly exists between us. I can fall in love on my own, but I cannot build a love on my own. For an “us” to be born, two wills and two feelings must meet.
Being in love, then, can be one-sided; love as it is lived, however, requires reciprocity. An unreturned feeling is not necessarily false, but continuing to feed it in the face of the evidence is not wise. We cannot always choose what we feel, but we can choose how to behave in the face of reality.
Logic, in this case, is not meant to erase our emotions, but to keep them from deceiving us. If someone does not love me, I have not lost a love: I have discovered that such a love had never been born between us.
A feeling can be irrational; the choice to nurture it should not be.
When Love Became an “Us”
At twenty-four, I met Stefania . She felt the same way, and then I finally understood the difference between being in love alone and true love: I was no longer the only one desiring, hoping, and imagining. There were two of us.
From that moment on, I committed myself to keeping that love alive through five years of courtship and forty years of marriage. I did not want words or important gestures to be the only way Stefania important textknew how much I cared for her. I wanted her to see it every day, especially in the little things. Making life easier for her, easing her difficulties, and smoothing her path had become part of the way I loved her.
Love, in fact, does not live only in the feeling from which it is born. It lives in care, attentiveness, and the daily resolve to make the path of the person we love easier. To love someone also means asking: “What can I do to make their day a little more peaceful?”
Now Stefania has been taken from me, but what we shared has not. After a lifetime spent together, I wait for the day when I will be able to join her, when my time comes in the natural course of things. I am in no hurry: I still have three children and two grandchildren to love, walk beside, and help along their way.
Perhaps this is precisely what Stefania left me: love does not end when we lose the person we love. It changes form. The care I once devoted to her continues in the people we have loved and in the family we built together.
Until the day we meet again.