Love or lust?

I want you to remember that as I write this I am 71 years old. I sit and sort out my memories, my remembered feelings, and try to understand my life better. This morning I am thinking about lust. We knew so little about lust when we finished high school because the nuns didn’t talk about it much. They simply said it was a sin, different from love, and it didn’t last. But no one told  us, meaning the entire school, for years and years what lust really felt like.

 Now at my age I can say that lust can be so wonderfully overpowering that many of us get married because of lust, believing in our hearts we truly love our groom. I’m talking from the bride’s point of view because that’s the side I know. I know that when I was 18, feeling totally grown up and mature, smoking and drinking and dating a man 10 years older than me, I thought I had fallen in love with him. When he asked me to marry him I did. Then I began to learn life’s heavy lessons.

 First we were happy. We had our first daughter after a year and a month. No, I wasn’t pregnant when we got married. We adjusted, sometimes happy, other times sad, in between somewhat combative or cold but then the romance would return in waves and we deluded ourselves into thinking we were both still in love. 

 Our third daughter was born. Then things weren’t so good anymore. It took me about 30 years to find out why. Sometime in the mid-’90s Time magazine did a cover story on love, reducing it to its hormonal value. It said that in the beginning what we know as love is the kicking up of our hormones. They come to a full boil for approximately two-and-a-half years. Then they dwindle down to slow boil, then to the bubbles before water simmers.  This period is what the magazine called the serotonin years.  If your serotonin is low, your sexual drive is higher and if it’s high, your sexual drive is lower or something like that.  In other words the strong sexual attraction you felt for your mate that made you agree to marry him is not eternal.  It does not last forever. It is strong in the beginning but by the fifth year it is almost gone.

 I walked out on my husband when we had been married six-and-a-half years. By then I realized I didn’t desire him anymore and had lost all desire to desire him again. I went to work made new friends then fell in love again. I realize now I use the wrong term. I fell in lust again and I discovered the same routine described in Time magazine — two years of wonder, then a calming down to affection, then discovering all sorts of things going on compounded by my mid-life crisis at age 33 and his mid-life crisis at age 40. We had them at the same time and we broke up again.

 What happened to the love that was supposed to last forever? Now 40 years later I realize I did not know how to love. I knew how to lust. Lust is clearly desire and it cannot stay forever. It is incapable of staying forever. What is capable of staying forever is love. Gritting your teeth through his late nights, his frequent disappearances. Smiling whenever he sends you flowers and convincing yourself it’s a sign of how much he loves you.

 I remember being sent six huge baskets of yellow roses with 24 roses in each basket to my office on our sixth anniversary. I felt my tiny office turn into a funeral parlor.  It was my wake. I felt he thought I was lying in state.  But if I loved him I would have stayed on. Love is always being able to go on. It isn’t very pleasant, I don’t think, but I feel it unquestionably for my children and grandchildren. They can make me happy or make me very angry but I still love them anyway. 

 This tells me I know how to love, know the meaning of love. Love is a quiet emotion without any expectations. Love means you are just there to respond to the person’s call whenever he or she needs you to guard her home if she’s going to travel so you arrange your schedule to be there. He needs you serve breakfast, lunch or dinner whenever and you are always happy about it. They ignore you often but you never complain. You are on the verge or releasing your anger but hold back so as not to offend further. That’s real love.  I feel that for my children and grandchildren maybe because they are a real part of me.

 I think about that often now that I’m old and trying to make sense of my life. 

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