Some Thoughts on Love for Valentine’s Day

I came into my home office this morning to find a gorgeous bunch of red roses waiting for me. Tom remembered it was Valentine’s Day, and those beautiful flowers are sending their fragrance all over the room this morning as a reminder of his love.

The media is full of news stories today about the high expectations that surround Valentine’s Day. It has become a huge commercial money-maker as men are pressured to turn the day into an extravaganza for their loved one. I have a few thoughts about love and what it really is, versus the appalling counterfeit portrayed by the media so often. I will put down a few random things that I have learned over the years.

1. If marriage isn’t based on mutual respect for each other and a shared vision for the home, it’s in trouble at the start.

2. Shakespeare had it right. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds…” Gray hair, wrinkles, all the ravages of time can’t change that steady, burning light of true love in the heart. (See the famous sonnet at the end of this post.)

3. As nice as gifts and cards can be, true love is best shown by hurtful words not spoken, that extra effort made for your loved one’s comfort, a passing over of something that just doesn’t matter even though it bugs you at the moment.

4. The best marriages are about walking through life and its troubles, hand in hand, looking up, and realizing 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years have gone by.

5. Love is a verb. Too many marriage counselors, including Christian ones, publish books and host conferences to help couples quote, “put the sparkle and pizazz back in their marriages”. It isn’t pizazz that’s needed. It’s love like Jesus shows that builds and sustains a lifetime of respect and tenderness. It’s about forgiveness, sacrifice, real understanding and a mutual Christian desire to walk in God’s will together. When spouses are encouraged to love each other with the love of Christ, they won’t need some artificial, temporal “pizazz”. It will be a quiet joy just to be in the same room with your spouse.

6. Strong marriages start from the top. Loving headship enables women to fulfill their God-given calling to submit and follow their husband’s leadership. If a wife is mistreated verbally or physically by a husband, or is otherwise neglected, it makes the Scripture’s injunctions terribly difficult to follow. Men make it easy to obey when they lead with love.

7. There are generational blessings when marriages thrive. Children have the life-giving security of knowing that Mom and Dad love each other. They have the freedom then to develop emotionally into the people God intended them to be, without carrying the emotional burdens of worrying about Mom or Dad and their issues. These blessed children also know how to treat their own spouses some day to perpetuate the gift of love they have been given.

I have an old fiction book from 1923 by Temple Bailey entitled, The Dim Lantern. I have kept it down through the years because the story is so lovely. A single girl has to choose between the attentions of two men. One can offer her every convenience, a life of ease, kindness, even respect from him. The other is her childhood friend, back from World War I in France after having been gassed. He returns a shell of what he once was with fears that make him question his fitness as a man. In this beautiful story, the love and respect of his long time friend, Jane, ultimately wins out. The struggle to rebuild his life causes him to push her affection away initially because he doesn’t see himself as man enough anymore with his war wounds. Jane sees the man he really is, courageous, honest, a person of integrity and strength who has been badly hurt. In the closing chapter, it isn’t a romantic scene of flowers and silliness. It is a scene of the returned soldier realizing he is truly loved by the woman he has always loved, because of who he is. An accurate, rock solid view of marriage shines through in the closing words of the book. I quote:

“And standing there…Jane knew that she had found the best. Marriage was not a thing of luxury and soft living, of flaming moments of wild emotion. It was a thing of hardness shared, of spirit meeting spirit of dream matching dream.”

Exactly right. In honor of marriage today, here is Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 116.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.