Love: Action and Reaction

Jealousy. That is the emotion I experience when I see pictures of my friend at Hamilton because her husband whisked her away on a surprise long weekend, when my 10-year anniversary is having pizza out of the box standing in my parent’s kitchen and not a romantic second honeymoon like my cousin’s, when my coworker gets a beautiful diamond added to her necklace as a “push present” each time she has another child. Jealousy is my reaction.

Those women seem to be loved with an obvious effort, a showering of love that is an outward expression of a daily feeling and choice. Why do I not celebrate their gifts with them? Why does jealousy creep in and convince me my husband loves me less than theirs? Why do I cheapen my husband’s love with disappointment because it looks less glamorous?

We all desire to be loved, to be cherished, wanted, desired for who we are and not who we pretend to be to outsiders. This longing isn’t wrong because it points to something greater than ourselves. It points to the One who loved us first.

So often my desire for specific affection dictates my reaction to love given. 

It feels easy for me to love someone with words and time because that is what I want. However, I rarely think of gifts to give or cards to send. I do not often imagine ways I can reorganize our house so my husband feels heard. I NEVER define cooking dinner for my family as loving them (although it is a great act of nurturing to do so three meals a day). Likewise, when people love me I don’t see their actions as amorous if I have expectations and a narrow definition of love. My loving actions do not come very often if I expect to only love as a reaction.

My marriage does not benefit when I define love in such short terms. How sad to have a man love me deeply but reject his gifts because they might not be sparkling, far away or written by hand. How heart-breaking to see his helping with the kids as duty only and not a sacrifice of his time and energy to be my teammate. How unloved must my husband feel when I wait to react to his initiatives and don't take any steps towards him first.

I can think of many gifts my husband has given that were complete, jaw dropping surprises. If I thought on one way my husband has loved me consistently since dating it would be with the element of surprise. He is a master at it! Do you know what surprises tell me? That he put in effort, that he thought and schemed about how to achieve it, that he paid close attention to my needs, wants and whereabouts. Should what the surprise is matter more than the act of planning and caring? It often does! This is where I have to remind myself of what is true and needed and wanted.

Jealousy convinces me the gifts are objects. It whispers that love has to fit into a certain sized package, that it needs to look like someone else’s. But, when we only give and desire narrow love we only feel a shallow amount of it. Love dares to be bold, vulnerable, silly, wild, exciting, life-giving, and sacrificial. Love is something we give our life to because we were loved in all our mess and we know others need to be also. It is a choice we make. Love is not a feeling on it’s own. The feeling is produced by someone else’s action. The emotion of love is a reaction to a choice someone else made to love us first!

The diamond on my left hand is a beautiful reminder, trips were fun adventures but love is the sacrifices, the planning time, the giving of oneself to another over and over again when it hurts or isn’t easy. The gifts are just tokens meant to say what our heart deeply longs to hear. Love is a vast display of emotion that dares us to give our life away.

When I question my jealous reaction to my friend’s gifts there is an awakening to my heart. I begin to explore when I have felt such lavish adoration from my husband. Is it still romance to find that he did all the dishes? Is his offer to take over the grocery shopping heard as support instead of him fixing my failings? When I can’t stop talking during the football game and he pauses it do I interpret him as annoyed or making a choice to listen to me? Isn’t that love too? 

I think it is. I think the actions and the reactions can be consistent ways to show love and feel loved.

Love is daily. It has to be courageous and sacrificial. It is what gets the dishes done and the lunches packed and the bed made. It is why he sits in the kitchen with me while I cook or reads to the kids while I finish the dishes. It is also finding a new bottle of perfume wrapped on my dresser, a family day at the zoo with pizza so I don’t have to cook or a new dress he picked out. It is all those gifts but, if I only had the presents and the surprises I would still question if the love was real?

We can't be so blind as to boil love down to something black and white. To say we only feel loved in one or two ways. We can't always be the partner reacting either. We have to take the vulnerable step towards our spouse, our friend or our family and act!

Jealousy creeps in when my expectations are big and my definitions are small. But, if I look closely at my husband's actions, his words, his attitude I experience those big grandiose reactions. Jealousy wins the battle when it convinces me that I should only be reacting. Love tells me otherwise. Love tells me to choose, to give and to act!