Can We Still Love Each Other?

Lately, I’ve been noticing and delighting in instances when couples are kind to each other in public spaces. One reaches for the other’s hand. A bit of playful banter. An arm on the shoulder. An affirming word or expression of fondness. A smile in the other’s direction when they don’t imagine anyone is looking. A head on a shoulder. Little tokens of warmth and affection that probably wouldn’t even have registered with an earlier version of me, but which now seem to be extraordinary.

I don’t know when I started noticing these things. Probably some time in my forties, that season of life where you start to observe that life seems to reliably kick people around. You see marriages and relationships around you start to reel and stagger. The kids take their toll. The jobs perhaps turns out to be less than you hoped for. Things start to break down or not work as well as they once did. What was easy is now difficult. What once brought delight now seems a duty. A happy marriage seems less like the inevitability that it may have in your twenties and more like a heroic achievement.

These little kindnesses also stand out because you become ever more well-acquainted with their opposites. Social gatherings with other couples now become punctuated with little hints of resentments bubbling under the surface. An interruption here, a withering eye roll there, a cutting remark here, a passive aggressive put-down there, an icy stare, an eye roll, a dismissive gesture, a weary silence, a snipe, a jab, a dig, a plaintive little irruption of unnoticed pain. Too often, you’re among the culprits. You wonder what’s going on beneath the surface of any relationship, not least because you know all the pressures full well. It’s all vaguely sad, awkward, and entirely understandable.

It hasn’t been a great week in the news for relational bliss. At least not in the corners I click around in. There was a piece on the bleak future of Japan which recently hit a record low fertility rate of 1.15 children per woman. Yes, there are other factors than relational harmony that go into low fertility rates (there are happy couples who remain childless and miserable couples who have all kinds of kids), but the Japanese reality of increasing loneliness and despair doesn’t seem to point to the prevalence of healthy romantic relationships. And it seems like Japan may be an ominous portent for where other “developed” nations are headed.

Then there was a cheery piece in The Globe & Mail called “How Young Women are Radicalized into Hating Men” which painted a grim picture of mutual suspicion, resignation, and hostility between the sexes, all of which is exacerbated (manufactured?) by social media. To quote the author, in certain corners of social media,

Women are portrayed as entitled, manipulative freeloaders seeking marriage to destroy a man’s life. Men are seen as serial predators and duplicitous creeps; in one TikTok survey, women said in the forest they’d rather encounter a bear than a man.

This was also the week that the dark phrase “Alpine Divorce” entered my lexicon, this appalling phenomenon of (usually) men planning a hike with their partner “from which only one of them will return” (I imagine the term “alpine divorce” can have a fairly wide and metaphorical semantic range). And given the trajectory of my reading thus far in the week, I of course couldn’t help but click on a link in The Atlantic reviewing a new movie called “Over Your Dead Body” which is about a married couple who go on a “getaway” while both secretly planning to murder the other. I think I’ll pass on this one.

After clicking through all of this, I found myself in a bit of a despairing mood. Can people still find each other? Trust each other? Extend good will toward each other? Do people still fall in love and choose to stay in love? Will men and women finally just acquiesce to their algorithms and settle into lonely lives of righteous anger and wounded egos? What will happen to us if nobody has any more babies? Do we think so much of ourselves and so little of life that a love that calls us beyond the former and summons us to the latter is beyond us?

I don’t toss around the phrase “Christian marriage” very often. It’s a term that has a lot of cultural baggage, and sometimes it’s too much work to unpack all that. But surely the antidote to the misery I have itemized thus far is to somehow decide to love one another in more Jesus-y ways. Or to at least lean in this direction. To extend unmerited grace in our partner’s direction. To choose to see the image of God within them. To make some attempt to understand their pain (and perhaps your role in it). To believe of them what Christ says of us—that we are never defined by our worst moments, that mercy can always call forth something new and better into being. To love the way Jesus does, which is to say, sacrificially. At cost to ourselves. To ask not, “what can I get?” but “what can I give?”

Back to those little kindnesses. I’ve not only been noticing them more, but I’ve also been trying to add to them myself (you can ask my wife how well I’m doing on that). And I’ve been more appreciative of being on the receiving end of them. Some days, they seem nothing short of miraculous. They are little tokens of resilience, of grace, of hope, of tenderness, of understanding, of forgiveness, of gentleness, of a shared road and of miles yet to walk. Of a battered-but-still-standing-and-determined-to-keep-standing love. Which is the best and truest kind of love that there is.