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For Story On Love, Check Out C.S. Lewis Instead Of Modern Bride The other day, in an idle moment at a drugstore, I flipped open Modern Bride magazine. As I browsed through endless pages of fantasy wedding gowns, I encountered one relentless message: young women should spare no effort or expense to make their wedding day the most memorable of their lives. Love golf? Get married on a golf course, and chauffeur your wedding party in decorated golf carts. Tie the knot on horseback, or exit your reception in a hot air balloon or helicopter. From Modern Bride, a prospective bride can learn everything she wants to know about invitations, dresses, gifts, cakes, florists, receptions, and honeymoons (preferably spent cuddling in a champagne glass-shaped bubble bath in Las Vegas). She can learn everything, that is, but the one thing that really matters: thereason for all of the fuss and expense. Modern Bride is deafeningly silent about what a young woman can, or should, look forward to on the tenth or twentieth anniversary of that memorable balloon flight, whose purpose, after all, is to launch a life-long commitment. Throughout our popular culture, it's the same story. We're fascinated with the heady early moments of the boy-meets-girl tale. Whether it's magazines, TV, movies, romance novels or pop music, we want "When Harry Met Sally." We want to savor the glow of youth, the mystery and anticipation of encountering the opposite sex, the first kiss, and the first night -- or month, or year -- together. It's fireworks, and we suspect that it's the best life has to offer. Our fascination with youthful romance is understandable, of course. But it doesn't leave us much to look forward to after our 25th birthday, or after the wedding bells have fallen silent. Is Modern Bride is right? Is youthful romance the best life has to offer? As the years tick by and the waistbands expand, must we turn resignedly to crocheting and stamp collecting, merely tolerating our graying spouses, and leaving all the fun to the kids? C.S. Lewis certainly didn't think so. Lewis, an English thinker and social commentator, grappled with this topic in his slender classic, "Mere Christianity." Lewis has a heartening message for all those couples whose wedding finery is tucked away in mothballs: the best is yet to come. Lewis is the first to agree that "falling in love" -- the moment when love is new -- is glorious. He compares its thrill to the exhilarating sensation we experience upon first encountering the ocean as small children. We stand there on the beach, with the waves swirling around our knees, and we're overcome by a heady sensation that's at once bracing and spine-tingling. But Lewis observes that as we grow older, we discover that standing in the waves no longer brings the same intoxicating thrill. Wading and paddling, we learn, are all very well, but there's something even better -- we can actually learn to swim. Learning to swim doesn't exhilarate us the same way that splashing in the breakers does. It's not the pastime of a summer afternoon; on the contrary, it requires time, work and perseverance. But when we have mastered it, we have a gained lifelong skill that extends our horizons immeasurably. When we can swim, we can enter deep water confidently, exploring far beyond the shore that initially marked the limits of our world. Lewis compares standing on the beach to infatuation, and swimming to the mature love that grows through marriage. It is the love that blossoms after the honeymoon passes -- when the breakers have ceased crashing over us, so to speak, and routine sets in. It is the love that develops as a couple puts down deep roots in each other, and awakens to the immeasurable satisfaction of knowing that the other will always be there. Falling in love, says Lewis, is the explosion that starts a marriage. But this deeper and quieter love is the engine on which a good marriage runs. Lewis points to a great paradox in all this. He observes that it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the initial thrill -- the infatuation -- and settle down to more sober interests, who are most likely to discover new thrills where they least expect them. Let the first thrills subside, counsels Lewis, and together, "you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time." Lewis found it sad that middle-aged couples so often fret about their lost youth "at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening" all around them. Modern Bride doesn't tell the whole story, after all. As memorable as one's wedding day might be, it isn't the best life has to offer. It's only a beginning, and it points to something far more glorious. -- Katherine Kersten is a director of Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis. |