Stages of Love

In the musical, "Showboat," Captain Andy tells his daughter, Magnolia, who is madly in love with her hero, Gaylord Ravenal, that yes, it is Saturday night and rejoices with her. Then he says, "Then Monday morning comes." It was his way of saying that life is also real; that at some time, however high we go, we will come down.

I once said, "If I had known marriage was this wonderful, I would have gotten married sooner," and I had married soon enough. The flip side of the coin, however, is that marriage is where we grow and many times, that engenders growing pains.

I have seen marriages that seem to flow more smoothly; where the Monday mornings are as simple as doing the laundry. And there are marriages that are more turbulent than hanging the wash. We were to discover that ours was not as simple as hanging the wash on a sunny Monday morn. The laundry I had brought into the marriage needed much work and I had brought in a lot of baggage.

What a Monday morning we awakened to! I now know that we had married at the first stage of love: "You are the most wonderful creature God ever made!" Everything about the other is totally delightful - even the way he sneezed was exquisite. Most celebrities marry at this stage which is why they divorce as soon as they hit the second stage shortly after.

The second stage is: "You have got to be the worst crumb God ever made!" That is when we discover the clay feet, the warts, the flaws, the dark side and don't want to have anything to do with any of it. No one ever wants to marry during this stage. In relationships where the love is unconditional even when we don¹t realize it, we somehow work through this dark tunnel to emerge into the third stage.

The third stage is: "You are the most wonderful crumb God ever made!" We have seen the clay feet, the warts, the flaws, the dark side and we love the Other anyway. We still want to spend the rest of our life with them. We know that the difficult side is the other side of the coin and we wish to keep the whole coin. When they announced their engagement I asked my then daughter-in-law-to-be, Bridget, "What will you do when you meet Chip¹s dark side?" Her answer was, "What I see of his good side makes me willing to live with his dark side."

I am not sure we would have moved on to the third stage had we not gone through our second stage inside marriage. I fully understand why many mariages don't take - for the majority of us, it is so very hard. Our son, Rob, was a Navy Seal and an adventure racer. He has been put in many very risky and life-endangering situations which demanded his utmost, both in body and spirit. Once, he said, "Mom, do you know what it's like when you are totally spent and you don't have an ounce of energy left to keep going and you dig deep inside you and pull out one last vestige of strength and make it and you realize you are more than you thought?²"

"Yes, I do," I said. "Marriage is like that."

Happily, there is a fourth stage to love which is exactly like the first. But this time it is based on reality instead of fantasy. We have seen the whole of our Other and can say, "Yes! You are the most wonderful creature God ever made! I know."