Commitment Before Love

Love isn’t something discovered and sealed in an instant; rather, it’s something that develops, deepens, and strengthens through a couple’s shared experiences. The more time you spend together, the more openness you share; the more conversations you have and events you experience as a couple, the deeper in love you’ll fall. In addition to becoming one flesh through lovemaking and one spirit through shared spiritual goals, you must also become one mind through shared memories and one heart through shared joys and pain. Hence, a long life of shared experience is the very fabric of love, weaving its intertwined threads into a single brilliant pattern. Love may have a qualitative aspect, but it also has a quantitative dimension. Look at your time together as an investment: The more you deposit, the greater the returns. See it as an occasion for nurturing love from genesis to fruition and beyond. Shared experience fosters the love. Adam and Eve didn’t date for forty years before they fell in love and married. They didn’t even date for forty days and forty nights. No, their commitment came first; their love followed. When first they met, they saw that all the fundamental components were there. And because of that they committed to each other, then fell in love. This is counterintuitive, especially these days, but it’s crucial. It is commitment that makes us fall in love: commitment to daily and mundane shared experiences, domestic chores, the breakfast drill, casually holding hands in the park, advising each other about problems at work, coming to depend on each other, building a life together, raising kids together, and jointly navigating the vicissitudes of life. Like the hooks and eyes of a woman’s dress, it’s the tiny, seemingly insignificant details of everyday life that serve to fasten a man and a woman together until they begin to feel inseparable.
This is what all the lonely singles today, who date and date searching for perfection, ultimately don’t understand. Love can’t precede commitment. Sure, you can be strongly attracted before commitment. You can be “in like.” But you aren’t yet in love. Think of it: If one of your friends told you, “I just love my job; I start next week,” wouldn’t you think it absurd? Rather, you fall in love with your job over time. As you and the job grow together and define your experience, you come to love what it has become. The same is true of sharing a life. You choose a person who seems worthy and likely, and then the two of you grow together, ever more deeply in love. If you, as a single person, are merely biding your time, waiting to fall in love before you feel ready to commit, I’d counsel you that love won’t happen until you commit. We’re so cautious today, unprepared to take a leap of faith until we have certainty. Yet as we’ve seen, certainty–monotony, predictability, sameness–can often be a recipe for disaster. It’s a husband’s certainty that his wife would never leave him, that she’s a mountain he’s already conquered, that leads him to believe he can have an affair and get away with it. “Well, my wife is totally won over,” he thinks. “My work is done here. But that stranger over there, gee, I wonder if I could get her.” That constant gap of difference, that little bit of uncertainty, is what keeps us from taking each other for granted. It may seem like a paradox, but it’s true: In the most successful relationships, uncertainty actually contributes to the security of the partners’ commitment, by pushing each to strengthen the partnership. The great secret of falling in love, I believe, is that it can be summoned. You can actually decide to fall in love with someone, and your heart will follow.
We must learn to be active in governing our passions, rather than being governed by them. Husbands come to me all the time, complaining, “I fell out of love with my wife. I’m no longer interested in my wife. She doesn’t turn me on. That’s why I’m having an affair.” I tell them, “With all due respect, sir, you’re being lazy. You can fall back in love with your wife if you want to, if you direct your heart to do so. Bur you don’t want to. What if an employee told you, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m no longer interested in working today’? What would you tell your children if they came home from school, propped themselves up in front of the TV for six hours, and said, ‘Homework just isn’t turning me on tonight. I don’t feel like it’? I presume you’d tell them, ‘Well, make yourself feel like it. Have some respect for yourself, and make yourself put a little effort into it. Nothing good comes easily.’”

We have it in our own power to nurture love in our hearts, if only we set our minds to it. Those who fail to see this, I believe, have lost faith in their own basic ability to grow as human beings, to change and improve. They take the easy way out, looking only for signs that their new lover echoes the old things they already know about themselves. But when the two find they’re not interested in growing together, and the magic wears off, they end up parting and wondering why love always seems to fail them. The answer? Because they failed to build it together. This is why I always say I don’t believe in love at first sight. Would you believe in the young person who, when presented with a flesh wound, decides to “become a doctor at first sight”?

In the Talmud, it is observed that an olive releases its oil only when pressed. In the same manner, lovers release their richest love after they’ve been pressed, once life’s challenging times have put them through the wringer.

Adam and Eve, it’s safe to say, had rather a life-changing experience together. When they fell from the Garden, it was as if their company were downsized, their house foreclosed, their furniture repossessed, their SUV stolen, all in the same fateful week. And yet they survived and thrived. The adversity strengthened them. Adam and Eve lived to the ripe old age of 930. I would speculate that it was after being expelled from Eden that they truly fell in love.

Love is an amazing blessing, but it takes work. As M. Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled, “If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions. The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person’s growth.”

The Seed

The woman is a fertile field. Her tender heart is soft soil that awaits the seed. She carries the potential of massive reproduction. Her mind is the incubator of dreams and the womb of greatness. She is irrigated when in love and dehydrated when hurt. She is enriched by those who love her and striped by those who abuse her. Those whom she touches will dine on her harvest. She will be the end of someone’s famine. She is the garden. She is the place where hunger is sated. She is the place where hunger is quenched. She is the place where rich soil will produce fertile food and lives are richer because of her. She is a garden, a focal point of those who love her and the absolute envy of those who don’t. Yes, the woman is a garden of potential.

A childhood nursery rhyme ask this question? “Mary, Mary quite contrary. How does your garden grow?” The question is a strong one that all Mary’s must answer. How does your garden grow? Where have the things come from that I have grown in my personal garden with my personality, the integrity of my own intent? Have you ever looked at yourself and thought, “How in the world did I get in this situation?”

Have you ever seen a part of your personality get choked by the weeds of a bad experience? Mary, Mary, are you quite contrary? What made you feel that way?

Many times contrary feelings are born out of the seeds that are sown by adverse situations. They are often sown by people and influences that do not even stay around for the harvest. You find yourself harvesting things that you did not even plant. Every affair, relationship, and involvement that you have experienced as a woman leaves something behind. There are seeds planted by each event that are not easily uprooted. You are a Garden, but only time will tell what your harvest will yield. If you have not liked what you are growing so far, look at what was sown. You want to change what is being harvested in your garden? Then all you have to do is change what is being sown or at least change who is sowing it.

Guard it with all your heart. Many women are suffering from misplaced, thoughtless words. It is dangerous to allow people to pour their pain into your field. It will grow there long after they’re gone. The seeds you see growing in the field of your life have been planted either by circumstance or by persons who have spoken things into your life. Be careful of whom you allow to speak into your life. Seeds last a long time and bring forth fruit for years.

TDJ