To equate love and sex – an equation the media culture thrusts into our brains and spirits every single day – is to tragically miss the full-bodied nature of love. The word “love” is a poem all in itself, and if we do not lean into the multiple layers of the word (which advertising never does) every time we use it, we tend to get a notion in our brain that somehow love means “the happy feeling you give me”, and in the absence of said “happy feeling”, love is assumed to either absent, a false construct, or worst of all, something that is just not possible between folks who used to have happy feelings and now they don’t. In that case, whatever commitments have made must be somehow flawed, open for discussion and revisiting, and ultimately disqualified. The worlds of grace and necessity collide, and we keep hoping that vows can really be vows even when we decide they’re really not. What harm is really done when love is abandoned for the great good and peace of my life, we wonder, and we turn backflips psychologically to make it all turn out okay.

And the truth is, we live in a world of grace in which God, does indeed, somehow allow us to land on our feet after all said backflipping, and often times, that “happy feeling you give me” can happen with someone anew, and more fulfillment than a person had before drops into place, and we wonder at the craziness of human beings in search of love, companionship, trust, intimacy, a ’til-death-do-us-part life.