HAVE I EVER BEEN IN LOVE?

Cromwell Argus, Volume LX, Issue 3111, 12 May 1930, Page 2

HAVE I EVER BEEN IN LOVE?

By a Thinking Woman.

I am confronted with this article, and I find myself staring at the title with some alarm. It is such an intimate question; it is a difficult question; have I, personally, ever been in love?

I have been married twice, yet that | is no reply. My readers want something deeper than that. We all have our own definitions of what we actually mean by "Love." I personally would divide it into two classes. White-hot emotion, which does not last, and which is infatuation; and saner, serener, solid affection which endures. I have been infatuated, but I cannot call that love. There has been more nonsense written about love than about any other emotion. Novelists and poets classify a sublime state known as being "in love." I can say frankly that that state has never happened to me. I have never been, in the accepted sense of the word, "in love." What is more, I would assert that I do not believe that about ninetynine out of the hundred casual acquaintances whom I might pick upon have ever been "in love." They have been infatuated, yes. Infatuation is a more uncomfortable proceeding; you starve, you live only for the moments with him—or her —you exist in a panicky, breathless, passionate sort of way only for the one man. It is too feverish to last. It sates itself with its own tremendous flow of emotion. Three or four months and it wilts; it is no more. Later we talk about it slightingly, laughingly, and most contemptuously; forgetful of the hurt that we suffered, of the pangs, and the very real pain of this trying episode. But it was not being in love. I had sampled all that by the time of my first marriage, and I called it romance. I married the first time because I liked the man, and I considered him to be the most charming companion. I suppose that love fascinated me. I was very young, and like most girls I wanted to be in love. But I wasn't in love, and, what is more, both I and my husband knew that I was not in love. It did not matter, for that did not rupture our marriage; we were very fond of each other. As a widow, I had a dozen or so men who declared that they were in love with me. I told them all what I now assert to you, that I did not believe in the state described by ardent poets and eccentric novelists as being "in love."

When I met my present husband, I instantly knew that I liked him tremendously; the one absorbing and outstanding fact was that I "felt so safe with him." We were married the fifteenth time that we met. People said, "Of course, you're in love." And when I said, "Oh no, I'm not," they looked at me amazed.

I have never suffered the loss of a meal through this languishing of love; I have never experienced the passionate thrills of which poets boast, but I have experienced a tender adoration, which is, to me, almost sacred. For him I would endure hardship, because the affection between us is the most beautiful bond in my life. It binds closer daily. We need no outside world, we have each other, and we ask no more of life.

I believe that the theory is rather dangerously misleading when it is voiced abroad. Young people expect to feel some fire within them which is in reality non-existent. When they do not find it burning there, they become alarmed. They are afraid to base a marriage on the more durable and lovelier affection, because they believe that somewhere, somehow, is the one soul mate who will hand on the fiery torch to them, and then, if they have already married somebody else, they will be in a sorry mess. This hot-headed craze for being in love is, in my opinion, responsible for many of the divorces that throng our courts of to-day. People naturally want to be in love. After all, it is sup-' posed to be the most marvellous emotion, and if it exists, we each individually have a right to it. People, believing that it does exist, stake their all on the marriage of infatuation, rather than upon the saner, wiser marriage of affection. At first it is a dream, later it is a nightmare. Infatuation wings him away when the rate collector calls, and wilts miser ably before the insistency of the mundane things in life. Infatuation can brook no handicaps, whereas affection revels in them.

No. In truth I have to admit that I have • never been in love. What a confession for a twice-married woman to make! And yet I make it quite sincerely, and I do not feel that it is a reflection on the bond between my husband and myself. We consider that our affection is a greater emotion, and of more lasting quality than ever the "in love" state could be.