So, Kleinheider is all “Blah blah blah. Sanford wasn’t in love and anyone who thinks he was doesn’t understand love.”
Love is not easy, it takes work. And, although I admit I am no expert, it almost certainly does not come during jaunts to Buenos Aires.
Come on, folks. If ever there was evidence that we need to take up a collection and send Tiny Pasture and his sweetie to Buenos Aires, this is it.
Because I’m sorry, but love is easy and love does to come during jaunts to Buenos Aires. Love is messy and it will take you by surprise and it will make you its fool. Love, as the song says, is a powerful thing.
Is the stuff that goes with love easy? No. Relationships take work. Keeping families together and cared for takes work. Getting up every morning and going to a job you hate for the sake of the people you love takes work. And it’s not fun. And it can even seem manly and ordinary and under control.
But that’s not love. That’s just the stuff that comes with love.
Love is inexplicable and stupid and it breaks you open and when it has you in its thrall you do dumbass shit.
And love goes on, even when its no good for you. Even when you wish with your whole heart you could turn it off. Even when the thought of ever having to see the person you love again makes you sick.
Love does not make sense. And it is always too much and not enough.
We tell ourselves this little story about love, like it’s one more thing on a checklist of things good Americans do. Grow up, fall in love, get married, have kids, grow old, die. It nestles in there very nicely between “go to college” and “get a job.” And, like going to college or getting a job, we like to pretend like love is something that requires work and effort.
But love makes fools of even gods, turns the King of the Universe into a rutting bull in spite of himself.
It breaks you open, love does. Leaves you gasping in its wake.
You can pretend like it’s ordinary, but pretending like it’s ordinary is what leads to trouble. Pretending its ordinary means settling for a friend you feel great fondness for and then, when love comes along to make you its fool, hurting your friend you feel great fondness for.
It often sucks to affirm love.
But it will fuck you up worse in the long run to deny it.
Filed under: Friends & Acquaintances
You got that right, B.
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I guess that I would disagree with both of you.
I think there are different kinds of love.
I think that lust is a type of love, friendship is a type of love, adoration, etc.
In that way I agree with you.
But I don’t think true love is a force of destruction. I think it is a force of creation. So I’m of the opinion that if your “love” for something or someone destroys anything–you, your family, your home, your health–then it doesn’t qualify as pure, true love. It may have a love-ish element, but it’s very destructiveness proves the lie.
[...] 6, 2009 by Katherine Coble Two of my friends are ruminating on the nature and action of [...]
Damn, girl.
Beautifully, beautifully written.
THANK YOU!!!!
Yes, beautifully written. And you get it. I read those e-mails and I thank God I was touched by them, because it means I’m not so cynical that I see a craven political maneuver behind every rock and tree.
I read those e-mails and I knew they would be trotted out for public consumption and excuse the hell out of me if I have some fucking EMPATHY for someone who was about to be humiliated in the public arena for something deeply personal. The fact that he was a REPUBLICAN mattered not a whit to me.
Life is messy. People are human, regardless of their political party. The human drama goes on.
And Mark Sanford is missing out on a great second career as a romance writer.
I have a hard time sympathizing with a man who ditched his family that way, even if it was for ‘love’. Especially if it was for love.
I don’t think you have to have sympathy for the man. I think love is a force of nature, like fire. It’s useful and wonderful and keeps many of us warm at night, but we can’t always control it.
The truth is that, if what he says about his wife is true–that he has always respected her and cared for her, but never been in love with her–then he never should have married her.
That’s when his cruelty started–to marry a woman he didn’t love, and to allow her to believe that he loved her.
But it’s easy for me to see how someone caught up in the very rhetoric Kleinheider’s advancing can get trapped in a situation like that–talking about love as work and learning to love his wife again. What bullshit. But if you believe that love is work and something you learn, I can see how you’d lose your mind when you find out the truth.
I kind of agree with Kat, and kinda don’t.
I don’t think love can be destructive per se. But I think there are things which can’t stand up to the truth of true love (and I’m so not talking about Sanford here, I have no idea the inner workings of his situation) and therefore must die in the presence of love as a natural consequence. In the case of a loveless marriage, if one partner finds true love, the marriage will fail, but it’s not the love that killed the marriage, it’s that the marriage wasn’t as true as what the love was and therefore dissolved in the mere presence of it.
The same way light doesn’t destroy darkness. It’s simply a matter of consequence that darkness can’t exist in the presence of light.
Beautiful post.
I still think that being batshit crazy in love and running off from your duties as governor of a state to pursue your lover in South America is reason to be dismissed from your duties…but it’s hard to fault the guy for being in love.
Yes, and if he wasn’t a man so determined to deny other people’s love (especially gay people) that would be all fine and dandy. But he’s a great screaming hypocrite, claiming that his love is true and uncontrollable, but other people’s love is perverted and wrong.
I think you are describing lust and not love in your post.
Ha, Jim, then you think wrong!
(Have y’all not yet learned the awesome rightness of me?)
It’s taken me a while to be able to reply here but it’s important to me, because I know whereof I write.
Here’s the thing: I really don’t understand all the talk of taking Sanford at his word, that what he’s describing as Love really is love. Maybe it’s infatuation, maybe it’s lust, maybe it’s romanticism, maybe it’s a lot of things. Even if anyone outside it could be sure, we certainly can’t do it from a few emails.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say it is Love. And let’s also say that, rather than supposing he’s a monster who never really loved his wife yet who worked all that time to concoct a facsimile thereof, (marrying, raising children, forging a political career together) he simply didn’t realize that whole time that what he felt for his wife wasn’t actually this Earth-moving, mind-blowing Love. Okay.
Now what? The upstanding person in the throes of Love has a difficult decision to make. And interestingly, given my experience, I can support either decision. Either he tells his Love, “I’m sorry. In an alternate universe, in a previous lifetime and I pray in the next, we will be together, but in this life I must honor my commitments.” OR, he tells his wife, “I’m sorry. I have nothing but respect for you and I want to be the person you married and honor our pledges to one another, but I can’t. I’ve realized I wasn’t entirely honest when I vowed my life to you, and I’ve discovered that a whole part of myself wasn’t engaged in our relationship.”
Either way, he has to say, “Darling, we must part.” He OWES that to both these women. I know how hard that is for him. But his refusal to do it, and his insistence on having it both ways no matter how human and normal it is, is what I despise about Mark Sanford. By refusing to fully honor his bonds to either woman, he chooses only himself, and that, I think, is the tragedy.