Love Is An Old-Fashioned Word: A Meditation on Being Under Pressure

There is a man standing in the greeting card aisle of a drugstore, somewhere around February 10th, wearing a jacket he's had since 2009. He has been standing here for eleven minutes. He has read approximately forty cards. Each one is more earnest than the last, each sentiment more impossible, each foil heart more aggressively cheerful, and he is beginning to feel — not that he doesn't love his wife, he does, enormously — but that whoever wrote these cards has never actually been in love.

They've been near love. They've observed love from a safe distance, taken notes, and then wrote copy for $12.99 plus a matching envelope.

He puts the card back.

He buys flowers instead. Flowers don't say anything. That's the point.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Charlie Brown is standing at his mailbox. You know the expression. The round head tilted just slightly toward hope, the zigzag shirt, the posture of a philosopher who already suspects the answer but hasn't quite given up on the question.

He checks the mailbox every year with the same impossible sincerity, and every year the mailbox delivers the same verdict.

Nothing.

And the cruelty isn't that nobody likes Charlie Brown. The cruelty is that he believed. He took the whole enterprise at its word, and the holiday — as holidays tend to do — rewarded his sincerity with an empty box and a slow walk home.

Charlie Brown is the patron saint of everyone who ever meant it.

In 1981, two of the most extravagant human beings in the history of popular music accidentally wrote something quiet and true. Bowie and Mercury kept circling something enormous in that Montreux studio — pressure, survival, the strange stubborn instinct to reach for each other in the dark — and then Bowie sang a line that landed like a stone dropping into still water.

Love is such an old fashioned word.

Not bitter. Not cynical. Something more complicated than either of those. The observation a person makes when they've been searching for the right word and have slowly, reluctantly concluded that language itself may have failed them.

That the word they need most has been handled by so many people, worn smooth by so many songs and poems and greeting cards and movie trailers and Instagram captions that it no longer has any edges.

You can't get a grip on it anymore.

Four letters. The most weight-bearing word in the English language, and we've applied it so carelessly to so many things — we love pizza, we love that show, we love, we love, we love — that when we actually need it to carry something real, we're not sure it still can.

My junior year of high school, an English teacher assigned us an essay.

Are you a romantic or a realist? Pick one, he said. Argue your position.

I was seventeen and had read enough to find the question irritating. I wrote a paper arguing both sides.

Pure romanticism, I argued, is a beautiful way to ensure maximum disappointment — a person who expects the world to rhyme and resolve will spend a great deal of time standing at empty mailboxes.

But pure realism, taken to its logical end, is just a long slow negotiation with defeat. A person who stops expecting anything wonderful has, in some meaningful way, already given up.

Why do we have to choose?

My teacher didn't like the paper. I didn't particularly like him. We were even.

But the question stayed with me for decades, and I think now that the romantic-versus-realist divide is exactly where the word started losing its weight. The romantics handed it to Hallmark. The realists decided the whole thing was embarrassing.

And somewhere between those two surrenders, love became a word people used carefully, ironically, or not at all.

On the evening of February 15th, 2007, Columbus, Ohio was recovering from an ice storm of particular viciousness. The kind that makes the city look beautiful in photographs and genuinely dangerous in person.

Schiller Park sat under a few inches of fresh snow, the wind chill was somewhere around twenty-five below zero, and I was walking through it with a woman I had been in love with long enough to know I didn't want to stop.

The cold that night wasn't weather.

It was an argument the atmosphere was making against the idea of human comfort.

Our boots made that particular sound — the squeak that only happens when it's seriously, earnestly cold — and the streetlights turned everything into a photograph of itself.

At some point in the middle of that frozen park, I stopped walking.

I meant to ask her to marry me.

I tried, actually. Seven times. The words kept freezing somewhere between my chest and my mouth. We just stood there, holding hands, looking each other in the eyes, the park waiting politely for me to become a person who could speak.

And then she said, softly, as if she were rescuing me from my own silence, "What would I do without you?"

Never one to miss an opportunity, I said, "Really?"

I bent down on one knee, produced the ring, and in Romanian I asked her to marry me.

Then I asked again in English, for legal purposes, and also to make sure I hadn't just proposed that she become my goat.

No card. No foil hearts. No one had written the words in advance.

She said yes. She was probably also motivated by the desire to get back inside, but I choose to believe it was the romance of the moment.

We got engaged the day after our first Valentine's Day together, which is either deeply romantic or a very efficient use of a holiday weekend, depending on how you look at it.

We don't really do Valentine's Day anymore, my wife and I. I get her flowers because flowers are honest and don't require explanation. We may or may not exchange cards, and when we do we tend to pick funny ones, because earnest is for people who are still working it out.

What we do instead is harder to commodify and therefore more real.

We do things throughout the year — small specific things that don't need a designated calendar date to justify them. A cup of coffee made the right way without being asked. Actually listening, not just waiting to talk. Showing up reliably in the unglamorous middle of ordinary Tuesdays when there are no Bowie songs and no streetlights and no greeting card in the world that covers what you mean.

The realists would call this a decision, a practice, a commitment. They're right.

The romantics would call it a feeling, something that happens to you. They're also right.

But neither one quite accounts for the moment in Schiller Park when both of those things arrived simultaneously — the decision and the feeling at exactly the same instant, in the cold, in the snow — and the word carried all of it without cracking.

That's what we've given away, I think.

We haven't worn the word out by using it too much. We've worn it out by letting other people use it for us. By accepting their version — the drugstore version, the foil heart version, the version that comes with a teddy bear holding a satin pillow — and forgetting that the word was ours to begin with.

Bowie sang: love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night.

That's the rest of the line.

It isn't soft. It isn't a sentiment on a card.

It's a dare.

A challenge to be the kind of person who shows up in the cold, on an ordinary Tuesday, with nothing to offer but attention and intention and the willingness to mean it.

Charlie Brown keeps checking the mailbox because he understands, better than the rest of us, that the whole point is the checking. He's not naive. He's a romantic with the survival instincts of a realist, which is the only combination that actually works.

The word isn't old fashioned.

We just forgot how to say it like we mean it.