Is Love Enough?

All you need is love.

John Lennon in 1967

To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.

Gottfried Leibniz in 1696

Love has, over the centuries, become the ultimate utility player in the game of life.

Love began as God's go-to starter in an all-star line-up that includes omnipotence, omnipresence and righteousness. Now there's a team. Throw in a little unchangeability and you're looking at an unbeatable outfit. What are you going to challenge them with? Fallibility? Materiality? Mortality?

Good luck with that. 

Which explains why we've co-opted love for ourselves. Love is the most malleable of all the spiritual descriptors, the most likely to forgive, the one that won't judge. Human love can accept a lot of behaviour we might otherwise consider less than godly:

He cheats; but I still love him.

She verbally abuses me; but we still love each other. 

We're alcoholics; and we can overcome that together because our love is strong. 

It's as if love is a kind of clueless fairy floating above everything, ignoring the dark side of humanity, prescribing pixie dust to fix things. Which is fine if you can likewise float about dishing out magic cures, but somehow I think you are with me down here in real life. Our lives are messy and unpredictable, a mystery in almost every way. I think we've adopted love as a code-word for unjustified optimism, to short-circuit disagreement and facing up to shitty things.

But enough negativity. Here's a list of qualities of which humans are capable that in my opinion are more valuable than love, especially in marriage, not least because - unlike love - they're definable. 

* honesty

* patience

* good humour

* integrity

* thrift

* an ability to look life in the face

* a sense of perspective 

and this one, which I stole: 

* absolutely no agenda or ambition for you beyond that you're happy

Which takes us neatly back to the Leibniz quote. In my thinking, a practical love is one in which you wake up every morning thinking about how you can make your sig oth happy.



Bottoms Up, morning lovers.