I didn’t intend to be a spinster. In fact I mostly didn’t think about what we now refer to as our relationship status at all. I was a happy kid. I loved people. I had fun. I was the neighborhood welcome wagon. They called me “Busy.” I played restaurant with my blue metal cash register and poured drinks for the jet set at my parents’ downstairs bar. I was popular.
I got the most valentines in second grade. Mom helped me have Valentine’s Day parties replete with intricate Hallmark paper doilies and cherry chip cupcakes. We played “post office.” It seemed as though hearts would be aplenty in my future.
I gave David Holly a water game. I debated forever to ensure it was the right gift. We smooched in the tunnels at recess in fifth grade and people said, “Hey, if you get married you’ll be “Holly Holly.” I thought, “cute,” and that was all.
Which brings me to this, the love month, and my query: in the age of an absolute ability to be autonomous, what makes people get together in the first place, let alone stay together, or marry?
Since history predicts future behavior I asked the old people first. My dad, 70, who has been married to my mother since 1963, said he married her because he couldn’t imagine his life without her. My mom, when I told her (since it’s the first time I asked or he told), said her father told her the same thing about my Mimi, which is the most consistent answer I received in my completely unscientific and informal poll on the question “why on earth do people get married?”
Another fellow surmised that people like the security of tradition. They do it because their parents did it and their parents and so on. It’s just the right thing or at least the next thing to do. You know the order: college, marriage, white picket fence, kids. He had just seen Fiddler on the Roof, by the way, and I sang “If I Had a Rich Man” to him, to his delight, but I don’t really mean it. I imagine such an arrangement requires too much of a tradeoff for people like me who find compromise especially taxing.
However, despite financial independence, gender equality, and the power to connect virtually in less than a minute across continents, and despite the sturm and drang of relationships, the fact is some people still find a person they simply do not want to be without. And it works.
And some people don’t. And it works.
Here’s why. Love manifests in a million different ways. Love of country, one’s fellow man, dedication to a life’s work, a commitment to an aid effort, to solving a mystery, to leaving a legacy, to following where your heart leads that is not necessarily to another person, but to a place or a cause.
The truth is there really may not be a lid for every pot. The danger for pots without lids though is their contents very well may boil over into wacky adventures and project launches and incredible friendships and collaborations they pour so much of their energy into that only an equally energized soul can distract them from their mission. My cup is so full I have to keep sharing it as best I know how. Hearts, you see, are aplenty after all.
And love is infinite. Happy Valentines Day!
Original post over on nFocus – on the Louisville Social Scene.
