The Beginning, and the End, of Love

Inspiring friends celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary last week, and were asked to spontaneously share the secret of their success with the entire congregation at church last Sunday.  With a huge smile, the wife made her proclamation from the pulpit: “Marry someone who is your exact opposite, and you’ll be happy.” 

Wow!  I might have argued her point years ago, but now I believe it.  Homogenizing differences can seem grueling, like stirring oil and water (and stirring and stirring without obvious immediate effect), but ultimately it changes us for the better.  We’re enlarged – not by losing our own identity and cloning the beloved, but by becoming more dynamic.   Less self-absorbed. 

This reality is not usually common knowledge when we’re young, but rather is learned over much time together in the trenches of life.  We begin not knowing much about what love is and does, but end up altered, perhaps transformed, by it.

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.  Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”  -Thomas Merton