Part I: The Ghost of That Which Never Was
The new elders quorum president in our ward is a recently remarried widower. He doesn’t talk about his first wife all the time, but he does somewhat frequently, when it’s appropriate and applicable to the discussion. When he speaks it’s evident that he misses his first wife immensely and is still very much in love with her. It is also apparent that he loves his second wife immensely and would not give her up for anything. I find myself identifying with him.
Like a widower, I long for someone who is not here, who cannot be here. I ache to hold him, to speak of shared interests and passions, to—as a friend said recently, speaking of a similar yearning—“fall asleep in his arms and wake up next to him.” Occasionally this absent presence takes the form of a tangible individual, but more often it is for that faceless, nameless Man that was never a part of my life.
Like the remarried elders quorum president, this doesn’t change how much I love Foxy J, how happy I am to have her in my life. I love to hold her, to speak of shared interests and passions, to fall asleep in her arms and wake up next to her. Yesterday we ate heart-shaped French toast for breakfast, exchanged small tokens of affection throughout the day, enjoyed a dinner of cheeseburgers and fries that we both had been craving for weeks, and watched Moulin Rouge! together after putting S-Boogie to bed. It was a wonderful Valentine’s Day.
Happiness and longing are not mutually exclusive. I wish I could convey that message as clearly as my widowed friend does.
Like any metaphor, this comparison only goes so far. I did not have my loved one taken from me; I chose this separation, and I could just as easily (which, to be honest, is not all that easily) unchoose it. There are those who would say that what I long for is not a valid love and others who would say that what I have is not a valid love, while few would come to the same conclusion about either of the elders quorum president’s marriages. I cannot honestly say that I know what it’s like to lose a spouse to disease or disaster. But I do have some idea of the emptiness one feels afterward, as well as the joy one can experience concurrently with that emptiness.
Part II: The Ghosts of Love Past, Present, and Future
I just finished Marly’s Ghost by David Levithan. The title page describes it as a remix of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Ben, bitter and numb to love after his girlfriend’s death, is visited first by her ghost, then by three other ghosts who show him love in his past, present, and future. As I read, knowing the story would parallel the familiar story of Ebenezer Scrooge, I wondered if it would conclude with Ben finding the true meaning of Valentine’s Day by finding a new lover to share it with. I was wary of this ending because I saw no character who could potentially fill this role so if there was one she’d have to come out of nowhere, and because I couldn’t see Ben going so quickly from despairing over Marly to hooking up with another girl. Thankfully, my fears were unwarranted. The love Ben comes to celebrate at the end of the novel is not so much an exclusive romantic love but more of an all-inclusive platonic love for the people in his life, fed by the memory of his love for Marly. It was nice to see Levithan’s vision of Valentine’s Day as a day to celebrate all kinds of love, not only romantic love.
I’m keenly aware of how many people view Valentine’s Day as a day to remind them of their loneliness, partly because I have so many single friends and partly because several of my students ranted the other day about what a stupid holiday it is. It’s unfortunate that our culture’s emphasis on romantic love leads to so much unhappiness. Yes, romantic love is wonderful--and I appreciated Theric’s post yesterday on why the romance part of romantic love is necessary--but it’s not everything.
“Sure, Master Fob, that’s easy for you to say. You have romantic love. Tell me again why it doesn’t matter that I don’t.”
You’re right. I have no right to speak for single people. But just as I identify to some extent with widowers, I identify to some extent with single people. I know what it’s like to want someone to call your own and who calls you his own, and to know that you may never have that (male) someone. Two big differences: 1. Again, this is my choice; I’ve chosen not to have that male someone. 2. I do have someone to call my own and who calls me her own. And she's probably the best someone I could ever hope for.
This is what I’m trying to say: Because life is life, I experience pain. But it makes me happy and takes away the pain’s sting to love and be loved by Foxy J. It also makes me happy and takes away the pain’s sting to love and be loved by Tolkien Boy and Melyngoch and editorgirl and [insert your name here]. I hope that, whether you have romantic love in your life or not, it makes you happy and takes away your pain’s sting to love and be loved by me.
