The heart or the brain?
The more I perused the so-called science of love, the more I was left wondering if it can ever be so well-planned or so conscious. I know I made my own “list” before I met my husband and, still, with as much “expertise” up my sleeve as anyone, my marriage certainly surprised me. It surprises me every day.
Did Cheryl and Bill ever think about things like that before they got married — match areas, accentuating the positive, lifestyles?
“We talked about goals — children, those things — but not like people do now,” said Cheryl. “We were also very different. I was responsible and more grounded. Bill was adventurous, impulsive. I was more restrained. He was an open book. I planned. He flew.”
And they were very different for as long as they were together. And not just superficially different — fundamentally so. Their marriage was a sort of counterpoint to everything we are being told about how to find true love.
There is a debate deep at the heart of all this: Is love, in fact, a matter of the heart or the brain? Some would say it “depends” on what you mean by love. But I think for anyone who has actually loved another — whether a child or a partner, a friend or a pet — there are no “depends.” While there is an element to it that is ineffable, inexplicable, eternal, when you feel it there is simply no question as to its truth or meaning. It’s as solid as oak.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
I would think of love as C.S. Lewis did, then: As a miracle, as an expression of something both earthy and other-worldly, a heavenly two-step, a delight of the divine. It is not empirical. How can it be when it is a heart carved into a tree and a love that still stands, long after the tree itself has returned to the forest?
