great love

i've been thinking a good deal about love lately. As in, the romantic kind. And I realized that I've been surrounded by great love. Maybe I just didn't recognize it because it didn't look how I thought it should.

My grandpa loved my grandma for 70 years. That's nearly a whole lifetime. Even after she passed, every day was spent looking at her picture, talking about her, missing her. When she was alive, he would've done anything for her. All of his stories were about her, even the ones where she wasn't mentioned.

My mother and father celebrated their 40th anniversary this year. Forty years of choosing to love the same person, when it's easy and when it's hard. I think that your parents' relationship is always an enigma--though you're around them for a significant portion of your life, so much of how parents relate is private. Which, I guess, goes for most relationships. Either way, however their public and private relationship plays out, I think that 40 years together counts as great love.

Love is a strange mix of instinct and choice. The television recently told me that "the heart goes where it wants," which echoes Woody Allen's "The heart wants what it wants. There's no logic to these things." Except, since it's from Ghost Whisperer and not a man who married his adopted daughter, it's significantly less creepy. But I digress. It's the heart that draws us to a certain person, but it's our will that makes us stay. Love isn't just butterflies and knee-weakening eye contact. After your heart has hitched your star to someone's wagon (or vice versa), you have to actively choose to stay hitched.

Sometimes leaving a relationship is the wisest choice, of course. And those are the decisions people need to make for themselves. I'm just proud right now to have two living (even if they're not all breathing...) examples of great love in my life, spanning at least two generations. I'm hoping someday to add my name to that list, too.