I remember falling in love. I was a dope.
I was in Ann Arbor, attending the University of Michigan. She was in Ypsilanti, attending Eastern Michigan University. It was a long-distance relationship: ten miles of urban driving, often after a few college beers. (Forgive the sin; God has.)
After dating for about a year, we had become “steady.” We would get together a couple of times every week, sometimes spending entire days together on the weekends. We talked on the phone almost every day. For weeks at a time I would send her something every day: a short letter, flowers, funny postcards. When we weren’t together, I thought about her. When I later moved to South Bend to attend law school, my heart went on a rollercoaster ride. When the weekends neared, it pumped wildly. When the weekends ended, it felt like lead.
I ended it during my second year at law school — with a ring and a request, accompanied by a promise that I have kept.
Fifteen years later, I no longer send Marie stuff every day, we rarely have a date, and sometimes I email her from work instead of calling her. She reciprocates with similar coldness.
You might say that “we’ve fallen out of falling in love.”
But it’s all right. We still love each other.
There’s a difference between “falling in love” and simply loving someone. I first read about the distinction (ironically, during my honeymoon) in C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:
[W]hatever people say, the state of “being in love” usually does not last…and [it] would be highly undesirable if it [did last forever]. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be “in love” need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both parents ask, and receive, from God…. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
I like to shock people by telling them I’m not “in love” with Marie anymore. When I try to explain myself, they usually reject the distinction between “in love” and simple love, preferring instead the platitudes of Hollywood that preach the need for a constant emotional high.
I could cite C.S. Lewis, but I doubt that’d make a difference to them. There’s too much empiricism in our cultural water. They need scientific evidence.
Fortunately, we now have it.
The cover story of this month’s National Geographic says that people experiencing romantic love have a chemical profile in their brains similar to that of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Moreover, studies have shown that such passion eventually ends, possibly because our brains adapt to the excessive amounts of dopamine produced by romantic love. As a result, the neurons become desensitized.
This is pretty much exactly the type of thing that C.S. Lewis described, though he did it in more metaphysic — and, therefore, more romantic — terms. It doesn’t surprise me. Lewis’s writings were mere adaptations of age-old Christian teachings, and science is constantly finding out — at great expense — what Christians have known for over 1,500 years. (Aside: if a scientist wants a minefield of theories to test, he should pick up St. Augustine.)
Still, it’s good to see a fundamental truth about Christian morality reclaimed, no matter how dry the scientists and their talk about neurons make it.
And maybe, with a little effort on my part, I can recapture a bit of that “falling in love” emotion Marie and I experienced nearly twenty years ago. This is the time of year to do it, or at least to remember it.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
