Billabonic

Life Among The Selected Few
2009-10-21 21:55:46 (UTC)

What Young Love Should Know About Old Love

How can young people comprehend “old love” when their only
experience is “new love” that is framed by flirtation,
excitement and pleasure? Youth experiences the heights of
soaring passion but often doesn’t quite know how to cope
with the aftermath when their emotions plunge into deep
valleys where they question the validity and transience of
love. In the absence of a marriage commitment, they have
good reason to fear ... and to feel exploited. After the
intense and volatile emotions that are unleashed in the
early explorations of new love, feelings can rebound from
a crest of great excitement and exuberance to an undertow
of emptiness or isolation. Tears of happiness can suddenly
turn into a seeming desert of loneliness. These realities
of our emotional makeup speak to the need for the security
of vows of commitment “‘til death do us part.”


New love is about a couple learning to cope with what it
means to be naked, not merely physically but also
emotionally. This is especially true when they have said
by their words and actions not just “I desire you” or “you
excite me” but “I need you.” Often the more intense and
complete their intimacy, the more exposed they feel
afterwards. And there is something in our nature —
particularly in youth — that rebels at the experience of
being vulnerable, that feels angry at having self-
sufficiency and independence eroded. Lovers can be, and
usually are, intensely territorial, responding with anger
and outrage at any hint of infidelity by their mates or
encroachment by a flirtatious interloper. At the same time
they feel unease as they realize that being a couple
increasingly diminishes their autonomy. Add to this a
confusing mixture of needs, the fact that freedom-loving
young lovers are driven to one another’s embrace not
merely by physical desire alone but by a deep, though
often unrecognized, emotional need to belong. Surely, we
mate because God hardwired us to do so.


Both poets and comedians have chronicled the irony and
hilarity of all this pushing and pulling. It’s hard to say
which is more often thought: “The path of true love never
did run smooth” or “What fools these mortals be!”


Old love has a better understanding than new love of the
dual dimension of intimacy. In youth, the fireworks of
physical passion — the God-designed motivating force that
initially drives us to mate at the outset — can obscure
the quieter but equally critical process of bonding that
is occurring with every tender touch and embrace. This
process of cementing the two together is seen only
indirectly through its mysterious consequences, something
that the Scriptures refer to when it speaks of “the two
becoming one.” As important and consequential as is the
observable physical union of the couple — with its
potential to create new life — is this unseen emotional
bonding that accompanies sexual intimacy, which, if
properly nourished, can unite them for life to nourish any
new life with which God blesses them. But youth, caught up
in the tumult and excitement of new love, has a limited
awareness of how the intimacy of physical contact, or even
mere eye contact, is at work to knit them together with
emotional bonds of connectedness, to produce an ever
stronger sense of wholeness, of completeness, of oneness.


God made the business of establishing and maintaining a
couple’s unity compelling by making sexual intimacy —
between two people who love each other deeply and
tenderly — one of the greatest pleasures of which humans
are capable. We see a parallel process in nature when an
oyster produces a pearl: each time a couple exchanges some
kind of intimacy, the bond between them grows deeper and
more satisfying so that the satisfaction of being one
displaces the satisfaction of being autonomous. And just
as the oyster makes the pearl ever more lustrous by adding
coat after coat of shell-forming fluid, a couple can
produce a relationship of priceless quality simply by
reaching out to each other day in and day out though
words, glances and caresses.


Sadly, young love doesn’t often see examples today of what
old love can be. Little wonder at their youthful
skepticism that a couple together for an extended period
of time can actually experience romance that is real, that
competes with what they know while they are still young.


New love compared to old love is somewhat akin to the
comparison of new silver with old silver. Certainly the
former possesses a dazzling brilliance. But the latter’s
tarnish defines the elegance and artistry of its design.
The marks of old silver’s age speak to the history of its
service, its significance and its value. Old silver
embodies a rich storehouse of memories that gives it a
luster which an immature piece of new silver, for all its
inherent value and shiny surface, has not yet attained.




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