Yes, I have experienced love.
Love becomes irreplaceable if allowed to grow.
You marry, have physical intimacy, look for apartments, furniture, food, find work, balance a budget, have babies, settle into a home, save money, wade through years of finishing your educations.
You stay together through sickness, pain and the tough ironies of life.
You travel, consume, support each other in political, social, and entrepreneurial ventures. You comfort one another when outside failures and criticisms come.
There arrives a point where pretense, theory, poetry, simply are not enough to communicate the reality of what two human beings are when fully formed and mature, and are still together. It’s not a point of being as one, but of being free and independent as individuals who are still learning about one another.
I won’t kid you, it is remarkable to arrive at a point of fifty years plus of marriage and be able to look back on the beginning of the relationship with no interruptions, no divorce, no splitting up, no ceasing to sleep in the same bedroom. In this instance there is a love of the shared love.
There is diversity. My wife is moderately conservative politically, I’m liberal. We discuss robustly. With that comes excitement, because we don’t boringly agree on the same topics using the same words repeated over and over and over. Sometimes it can get heated. But even that is wonderful.
Which Is It? Paranoia, Feeling Sorry For Myself, Or My New Beer Belly?