My boys had their first breakup experience recently. Not them, of course, but their Uncle and his fiancé.
After 8 years of being together (as long as the boys can remember!), and their recent engagement, we received the bad news that it was over.
I was surprised at the boy’s reaction; I did expect for them to be upset, but not to the degree that they were. My older son was especially hard hit, “If they love each other can’t they work it out?” he asked. I told him maybe they didn’t love each other anymore, and he quickly wanted to know “doesn’t love last forever?”
We are now at the stage of the questions I don’t have the answer for, and ‘google’ won’t help me with this one, so I have been left mulling love over ever since.
The first thing that struck me was in a book I am reading. At one point the main character is having a love letter translated into Arabic, and she notes that she hopes the word for love in Arabic doesn’t have double meanings, as it does in other languages.
That made me think, in our own language, love is a disposable word.
I’m in love with a lot of things, animate and inanimate, in that case: “I love cheesecake!” or “I love that series!” or “I love that sweater!” Most of these things are NOT eternal love (well, maybe the cheesecake!). Also, our word love is not defined to whether it is romantic love, or platonic, or familial love.
Many languages and cultures better define what form of love a person feels, but to the Western world anyway it seems we are stuck with the cliché of “Love Conquers All” (Virgil). Disney movies, Hollywood movies all reinforce this, to both young and old, whether familial, platonic or romantic. I guess it isn’t surprising that my boys were distressed to discover love doesn’t conquer all.
My younger son has also had bigger issue with my being adopted than my older son. He understands that I was given away to people better able to care for me than two teenagers (as my parents were at the time), but he cannot understand why years later, after reuniting with my birth mom, she would choose not to be a part of my life at this point.
“She is your mother!” he reminded me. How do I explain to a 7 year old that it is a little more complicated than that? How do I avoid spoiling their concept of love?
They are still young enough to see love in black and white. My older son didn’t believe me the first time I told him he’d likely have more than one girlfriend (or boyfriend) before getting married. My younger son, who is very attached to me, finds the thought of a mother not having contact with her child (grown up or not) mortifying.
I don’t want to break their hearts by being the black cloud of pessimism when it comes to love, any more than I cringe at the thought of their heart being broken in love at some point. It was bad enough being the big sister to my brother, and watching him suffer heartbreak. What is the positive message I can send?
I confess, I too was a romantic, with love on a pedestal. Plato’s “Symposium” was my favourite book. But after my journey in life to this point, I’m not quite so idealistic, however I still believe in love. After looking and looking at sources on love, I found the message that I liked best from philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. To love “is to be delighted by the happiness of another.”
Yes, in some cases, the delight will never end, in other cases it may end, whether sooner or later. It gives my boys a pretty good answer to both their questions: maybe your uncle and auntie weren’t quite so delighted in each other’s happiness anymore, maybe the memories of giving me away were too painful for me to be a source of delight to my birth mom at this point.
I had a book when I was little called “Love is” and each page had a different adjective and illustration to go with it. Maybe we need to focus on all the other adjectives besides “forever” to help us remember love is still a wonderful thing, even if it doesn’t last forever or conquer all?
