The Power of Love

When a person is in love, she could keep her hand in ice water until it is frost bitten; lift a car off a toddler – not even her toddler; eat 50 hotdogs in under 30 minutes; give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an anteater; walk across burning coals; run across the Mohave Desert in a wool coat and so on like that.

Corporations should hire only people in love, fire them when they are no longer in love and replace them with other people who are in love. If everybody who worked for a company was in love, the company could get away with sexual harassment, pay people far less than they are worth, and repeatedly ask them to do things near the limit of their capacity. Not that we want our companies to do those things, but they could, if everyone was in love- and no one would hardly notice.

If everyone on the planet was in love, global climate change could be soon solved. Those who lived in cold climates would never complain about the cold, they would just cuddle up with the one they loved, without needing to produce greenhouse gases to stay warm through energy use. Those who lived in warm climates would never complain about the warmth and not care about air conditioning, because they would want to spend all their time looking at the body of the one they love in its relative state of nakedness.

Of course, if we were all to stay in love, we might have to give up one of our long-standing traditions – monogamy. It is not easy staying head-over-heels in love with the same person for more than a few months or years. So, for everyone to maximize the amount of deep love they feel over the course of their lifetime, we would likely need to be polyamorists.

You may think it a strange thing for a marriage and family therapist to be advocating polyamory, but let me explain. Sure, it would be devastating to our families, our children, even our economy, for everyone to shift immediately away from monogamy. However, what if all of us were constantly seeking to improve ourselves, to the extent that every few years the people who knew us before could not recognize the new us. This could mean those who loved us before might be able to fall in love with the new us, especially if they too were evolving and becoming new people.

What sort of “new people” should we seek to become? We should seek to become the person we fantasize about being, the person we find most admirable, most attractive. We could constantly roll out the new us, excited and refreshed, ready for the person who once loved the old us to find the new us, and fall in love with us once more.

As long as we are all moving ahead with our lives, finding excitement in now, in tomorrow and at future prospects; the odds of the person with whom we are in love falling out of love with us, would go down dramatically, I would suspect. Science could be done to either bear me out on this, or not.

The more we all stay alive and fresh to what life has to offer, the more likely it is the person with whom we are in love, will stay in love with us and we with them; without having to become polyamorous – in anything other than the new way I am proposing here- or otherwise jeopardizing the social order that makes traditional families possible.

I know, you hear it all the time, that being in love is always temporary and you should not look for love to sustain your marriage but rather you should look for something like compassion or commitment or some other word beginning with C. I say, that may be, but since we all know love has a singularly strong-positive effect on human beings. Why not figure out a way to stay under its influence for as much of our lives as we can?

In some ways, I think we are given this proposition by life: if you want to increase the likelihood of staying in love, sign a mutual change pact between yourself and the one with whom you are in love.