“There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them. I’ve looked around enough to know that you’re the one I want to go through time with…” Jim Croce’s last love song still brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it, the truth of it becoming clearer with each passing year.

Almost every great love story shares this common theme of the brevity of love, whether it lasts for a year or fifty years. The moment you become deeply grateful for the gift of love you share with another person, the more fragile and ethereal the love becomes. This year’s Valentine’s Day celebration was a personal testimonial to that experience; our cards to each other this year a testimony to all the years we have spent learning to love each other, and the grace, strength and courage that the work of staying bestows.

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“Love is an act of endless forgiveness.”  — Peter Ustinov

If love is a verb, than forgiveness is the action verb. It is the highest form of love and the single behavior that most distinguishes our human potential. In an ancient tale from the Kaballah, God told some angels in training that the capacity to forgive is the most excellent gift in the human experience, more essential to the continuity of life than the courage to sacrifice your own life for someone else or enduring the pain of giving life. God explained to the angel ‘Forgiveness is the only reason my creation continues. Without forgiveness, all would disappear in an instantaneous flash.’

Certainly some might suspect this true with a quick glance to the Middle East. What would it look like if the rule of power and force was replaced with a mandate for the strength and courage of forgiveness? The comment by Desmond Tutu that “Forgiveness and reconciliation are not just ethereal, spiritual, other-worldly activities. They have to do with the real world. They are realpolitik, because in a very real sense, without forgiveness, there is no future’ speaks volumes about the state of things.

And yet we don’t have to look that far, for most of us, right in our own homes we struggle with hurts, real and imagined that separate us from the ones we say we love. The smallest of details in sharing a life with someone can easily and often with out notice turn into a story line about the person you love. For years, my disregard of my husband’s need for order and cleanliness and in turn his disgust at my laissez faire approach to house cleaning came to mean everything. We weren’t talking about behaviors where we dramatically differed, instead each housekeeping incident was a personal insult that with just a small push inflamed to fury about the other weak points in our relationship.

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“The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” -Victor Hugo

Holidays magnify the best and the worst of our relationships. There may be no holiday that reflects this more brilliantly than Valentine’s Day. I spent many years in my 25 year marriage waiting for just the right gift, or the right words on the right card to show me how much my husband appreciated and loved me – I believed then that single moments or holidays done right could heal the long standing differences between us. The years that worked the best were the ones where we were already on solid and intimate ground. The years when we were estranged or exhausted, Valentine’s Day served only to illuminate our distance. The good ones and the bad ones have both taught me about reasonable expectations in relationships and for Valentine’s Day.

Collectively we are heavily invested in this holiday of love. Worldwide spending is over $28 billion and here in the US sales are expected to top $13 billion. That is a lot of love to be celebrating, given that so many of us are broke and afraid for how long it will take to prop up our ailing economy. This is a testimony to the fact that our need for love, both giving and receiving it, is as basic a need as our needs for food and water. Humans thrive on love, our existence without meaningful relationships is a shadow of what we were put on earth to do.

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Sleep is our most basic human need. Some thirty million of us will attest to the impact of insomnia on well being. Indeed, unlike fasting from food which humans can survive for weeks, being deprived of sleep can kill you in days. The impact is so severe, that it not only precipitates physical disability, but also insanity which it is why it was one of the cruelest and most inhumane torture methods ever devised. Considering that complete lack of sleep is fatal, it is not really a stretch to realize that consistent late hours and a growing sleep debt we all share is responsible for a wide variety of illness, injury and disease. The ability to rest and rejuvenate is at the essence of our vitality.

Under the best of conditions, maintaining loving relationships is one of life’s biggest rewards and challenges. Many of us don’t realize how big role exhaustion plays in our relationship skills. The patience to nurture the bonds of intimacy in our relationships is not strengthened through fatigue, rather it is often one of its first victims. The struggle between sleep and sex is a common one for most couples in long term relationships. Tiredness is one of the most commonly cited reasons for not being intimate.

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If love is so healing why does it hurt so much? This is a good question with difficult answers. Love the verb is a constant practice of feeling compassion, giving the benefit of the doubt and struggling to feed our goals and desires, as well as those of whom we love. This aspiration is a juggle even in the most functional of relationships; and the score rarely comes up 50-50.

Approaching our intimate relationships with the intent of an action verb is realistic, if not a bit daunting. The romantic version of the verb, the measure we use for our love relationships, reflects the illusion of love as a vacation. We sit side by side in some beautiful natural location and the only action required is offered by the love that we feel, washing over us, filling us, just as easily as the nearby waterfall washes over and fills the streambed. Physical intimacy carries the potential to generate this experience; flush with heightened hormones and released tension; lovemaking seems to encompass all of what is love.

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When I teach about the Ecology of Love and talk about the water that lives between people I often use the term “showing up” to describe the flow that happens in relationships. In relationships, like the ocean, there is an ebb and tide to how we are present for each other, but if the water in the relationship is always out, then both people feel alone more often than they feel like there is someone at their back. Many people go through years in partnerships where the experience of loneliness is profound. It is something that I struggle with in my own marriage, each of us having a different sense of what togetherness means and how much of it we need.

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“I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” — Vincent Van Gogh

I found this quote recently and have been hanging onto it, almost like fingers clutching a ledge, as the onslaught of stories and information pours on about the demise of our current state of relationships. Last week’s coverage of the historic turn of events where more women (51%) are living without a spouse than with one. Depending on your race the statistics are as low as one in three (Black women) and only as high as 6 out of 10 for Asian women.

That those living in marriage in America is now a minority, isn’t really surprising. It confirms our collective experience of yet another of our institutions no longer able to serve its members. In part this is due to a healthy maturation of all the members. We are more able to choose our lifestyle, and our expectations about our relationships are more demanding. Crisis, opportunity or act of true art, our relationships are in the process of reinvention.

Just as in our work lives, our personal relationships are not all lifetime experiences. As we change and grow, healthy careers keep step. So it is that we demand this of our primary relationships. If the relationship succeeds in teaching us patience, kindness, generosity and the gift of our human heart during its existence, it has succeeded.

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Making time for love is an important barometer of the commitment and sustainability of your relationship. When you consider the outrageous scheduling hoops we agree to without qualm in our work setting, or even more intensely in managing our children’s activity calendar, it makes you wonder how the idea of scheduling intimacy could still be so taboo.

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Some days, try as you might, the weight of all the promises yet to keep is almost unbearable.  I work at mindfulness, seeing the trees as I drive and noticing a bird overhead or the sound of my children’s voices.  I work to create a thought that can move me closer to gratitude and optimism, which sometimes feels like a leap.  The thought that moves me with the most certainty every time is knowing that I have a partner, a lover, a husband who will stand by me.

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