For any of you who have followed me, you have probably figured out that you won’t see many reviews of love stories, and likely none of romance novels. Between the ads that show up on my Kindle and posts this week (as Valentine’s Day approaches), in places like the New York Times Review of Books and Publishers Weekly, it has come to my awareness that I am definitely out of step with a certain segment of the reading public!
I can readily hear the women who follow this blog shouting at this point, “it’s because you are a man!” All I can say to that is, “guilty as charged!” Personally, I’d like to think it is because I am living two of the greatest love stories I’ve known–one with my wife of 35 years and one as part of the church as Christ’s betrothed and beloved of God.
That said, on further reflection, I have to say that I enjoy love stories when they are part of bigger stories. Right now I am reading Glorious War, an account of George Custer’s Civil War adventures. Interspersed with narratives of Custer’s boldness, strategic sense, and courage in battles, we have the adventure of his courtship and marriage of Libbie Bacon. The love story is a welcome respite from the battle scenes and helps me see Custer as more than a one dimensional figure.
Likewise, one of the things I’ve always loved about Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter is that it sets her marriage and deepening love for Nathan Coulter alongside the challenges of rural agriculture, the memories of war, and the obligations of extended family and community.
It was fascinating for me to read Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Daniel Jones Love Illuminated. Jones edits the “Modern Love” column for The New York Times. She expresses her surprise at her discovery of a central thread in Jones book:
“We were promised an exploration of life’s most mystifying subject, but instead what we keep coming back to is a study of life’s least mystifying subject: how it might come to pass that two like-minded graduate students in the same creative writing program might fall in love, get married, learn that marriage is not composed of an unfolding series of ever-heightened erotic pleasures, and yet still manage, year after year, to keep their leaky but serviceable vessel out of dry dock.”
Maybe this explains for me why I like the kinds of love narratives I’ve described above. They are situated in the much larger and yet less fantastic context of real lived, human experience. I like the phrase “leaky but serviceable vessel”. Real love wars with our personal selfishness and calls us into self-denying love. It struggles through raising children together, financial tensions, illness of parents or spouse, the tension of the siren call of career and the harder work of going deeper in the encounter with one other. Probably like others on this journey, I have to say it has been only in a small measure what I imagined, and looking back over 35 years, far better than I could ever have hoped.
As I write these words I’m conscious of my single or formerly married friends. I neither want to venture explanations of why one hasn’t yet found the love we’ve lived these many years nor why it hasn’t worked out for another. That would only be to add to the pain. What I would propose instead is that the love stories we read should not be the ones that are anodynes for our pain or fantasies of what we wish we had, but the narratives that set love in the larger context of life, that prepare us to be better lovers wherever God gives us the chance to love.