WORLD | Love and marriage on Valentine’s Day | Peter J. Leithart | Feb. 13, 2016

I found the article to be thought provoking. In the age of cards and flowers which can be well appreciated, lasting love between husband and wife is forever.
The romantic paradigm of modern love is so well known as to be trite: strangers meet, “fall in love,” and decide to spend the rest of their lives together. In many cases, the worlds they inhabited before meeting did not overlap at all. My parents knew my wife’s parents for years before the two of us met, but we had never met until we were three years into college. None of my four married children knew their spouses before young adulthood. Most come to marriage with a life story, an ongoing conversation about the world that does not include the other.

Falling in love means revising that life story and ongoing conversation so that it includes the new loved one. The man starts telling his story in a way that includes his first sight of his wife, their friendship and romance, the proposal scene, the wedding. Wives do the same, only better, because they recall all the details guys forget. Each begins to indwell the narrative of the other.

This can’t be a single addition to a story that remains unchanged in other respects. Because the man and woman end up married, their first encounter and conversation become fraught with possibility. On that enchanted evening, he saw a stranger and heard her laughter across a crowded room. He had seen beautiful strangers before, and heard them laughing across crowded rooms. Nothing is more common. Yet this becomes a critical moment in the story because of what happens after. The whole story changes because one new character is added. What used to be a straightforward melody line becomes a fugue, line intertwined with line. What used to be a simple melody line gets harmonized; it turns polyphonic. His life dwells in hers, and hers in his. He is hers, and she is his."
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