It's All You Need

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Love has been on my mind quite a bit lately, for a number of happy reasons. A few weeks ago I officially partnered up with my best friend, an occasion marked by a ridiculously joyful party attended by our favorite people. And just this weekend, two of those favorite people became engaged to each other. I'm pretty sure everyone who knows them actually blacked out for a second from pure excitement upon hearing the news. 

Thanks to Valentines Day, reality dating shows and Jim and Pam on The Office, I think we've been numbed by a saccharine-sweet version of love. The version of love dished out in popular culture is like a perfectly good peach that someone has poured that nasty Dole canned syrup all over. The real thing is a lot more complicated. It's imperfect. But it's better. 

I'll admit that I used to be among the most cynical of cynics. Now that I view things differently, I can't help but notice the revitalizing effect that a truly honest, supportive partnership has on the people in it. To avoid embarrassing anyone I know personally (or myself), I'll point instead to some of the people I write about at Shmoop. Sophia Hawthorne used to write blushingly about how great her and Nathaniel's sex life was. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were each other's best editors, fans and critics. And few people were as adorably, heartbreakingly devoted to their spouse as Mark Twain was to his beloved Olivia Clemens. After spying her photograph in her brother's ship cabin, the whiskey-swilling, blue-streak cursing, proudly iconoclastic Twain became determined to win over this soft-spoken, church-going beauty. He finally succeeded, and their partnership was by all accounts a beautiful thing to behold. 

We're not going to talk about Zelda and Scott.

So in honor of the Real Thing, I'd like to share one of my favorite Mark Twain passages. It's a letter he wrote to Olivia Langdon, shortly before she became Olivia Clemens. It's not as zingy as some of his better known works, but it's just as true and I'd guess he considered it one of the most important things he ever wrote. I hope it proves as true for Kate and Sachin as it did for Mr. and Mrs. Clemens.

This 4th of February will be the mightiest day in the history of our lives, the holiest, & the most generous toward us both -- for it makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, & doubles the strength of each whereby to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, & something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, a new mystery to life; & Livy it will give a new revelation to love, a new depth to sorrow, a new impulse to worship. In that day the scales will fall from our eyes & we shall look upon a new world. Speed it!
- letter to Olivia Langdon, 8 September 1869

 

Posted on Monday, Sep 28, 2009