Life, love, and the pursuit of happiness

This morning I was reading an article in The New York Times called “Love in the times of dementia”. It talked about Sandra Day O’Connor rejoicing in the fact that her husband of 55 years, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, formed a relationship with another woman. She even visits them because it’s the happiest she has seen him be in years. And thus, the concept of “old love” versus “young love” is introduced.
We all know young love—it’s modeled after romantic comedies and Disney movies, and it requires extremes of emotion, sacrifices, tears, and grand gestures. Old love, however, is the one that values positive times over negative times, the one that derives happiness from seeing the person you love be happy. It completely goes against our western culture.
Since we are young our society has taught us that we have a personal right to “the pursuit of happiness” and we have somehow come to equate that happiness with things that will bring us personal gain—I’ll be happy if I live here, I’ll be happy if I have this job, and so on with the I’s. But it seems like somewhere throughout our lives, our social nature we have ignored somehow takes over. Maybe it’s having kids—I’ll be happy if my children are happy and safe. And ultimately, it reshapes the way we love, and maybe (according to studies) maybe even makes for better more stable love.

Since living in Bangladesh, I’ve been reshaping the way I think about love. In Bangladesh there is a natural tendency to include the family in your own personal pursuit of happiness. Many people still live in extended families so your actions affect a much wider range of people than yourself. Hence the support many of my students felt for arranged marriage—your family is going to live with your spouse too, why shouldn’t they have a say in who that person is? And, as Indian literature teaches us, love that lasts is learned much more than it is there immediately. And now this idea today, “young love” and “old love”, I first understood it recently, that drive to put someone’ happiness before your own—in trying to maintain a friendship I wasn’t yet ready to have because I knew it’d make another person happy. I wasn’t able to succeed at that, but I have years to get to the old love stage…

My final definition of love comes from my grandparents, who have been married 57 years. Love is taking out the sweets your diabetic husband puts in the shopping cart while he’s looking away and always reaching out your hand for your wife while she’s going down stairs, because you know she’s prone to falling.