This is the second in a series about love, read the first here.
Love is in the doing. There is nothing on Earth that can make people sappier, more unreasonable, and more energized than love. That is why the wedding industry is so large— witnessing love give us hope. There is a shared humanity in being a part of a wedding ceremony, a sense of belonging that we as humans crave beyond anything else. What is it about weddings that so aptly articulates our infatuation with love and its seemingly-mythical nature? It’s in the doing.
Some of the best wedding vows I have ever heard reject time-tested formulas and pre-written platitudes. Instead, in improvisation, the truth of the couple comes out better than it ever could ahead of time. When a vow truly comes from the heart in a moment of complete infatuation, you hear the stories of what people have done, not what they plan to do. Not just what they promise for the future, but rather how to continue what is already being built. The story of their love.
People love stories. We have been telling the same stories for tens of thousands of years, in some variation or another. The similarities are so apparent that we have retroactively developed a template for analyzing story structure, known as The Hero’s Journey. Over-simplified, it outlines a person setting out, meeting an obstacle, and overcoming to find their way home. Love stories are no different and that’s what makes them compelling, even when they are so often the same. They are about overcoming obstacles and returning home. Doing and belonging.
This is what comes out in well-improvised vows: the Hero’s Journey of the couple’s relationship. The doing of the love. The mystical nature of love is in the mundane. It’s in the path to where we are now, and how that will continue into the future. It is not in the “I vow to take care of you” and the “in sickness and in health.” It is in the foundation that has been built. The “look at the family that we have already started,” the “we struggled but we bought our first home,” the “we fought against all odds and made it to this moment, right here, promising to do it again and again— forever.”
The impact from vows like these is in how true they are. The love comes from the experience, the doing. Stoic advisor Seneca the Younger says “no man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.” This applies to love too. No love is as unfulfilled as the love that has never been tested, which has never had to prove itself. Only when backed into a corner will the true nature be revealed.
We are in love with love, and for good reason. It follows the most compelling narrative structure possible and gives its own inherent rewards before, during, and long after each struggle. The way that love interconnects the depth and breadth of human existence gives it its mystical qualities, and transcends the barriers that divide us. Weddings capture that in an overplayed model, but every now and again the right vows can make the story feel brand new again.
The bravest thing a person can do is to love another, to give them the most breakable part of themselves, and to know that one day, death will break it anyway. In that fragility lies the power of love, the voice of defiance, resounding deeply in the human spirit, shouting: “I will love anyway.”
Edited by Jeremy Harr and Abigail McKay Cherry