January 19th 2010

Forms of Love: Friends, Family, Flames

With Valentine’s Day less than a month away, it’s a good time to think about love. Not falling in love; that’s easy. Our body’s chemistry takes care of that.

No, it’s the what-comes-after-the-goopy-cards that I want to talk about: the loving. That’s what scares us. It consumes time, drains our emotions, and makes us vulnerable to hurt and loss. So why do we get sucked in, again and again? Because we are creatures who attach. Two recent TV documentaries expand on this.

On the surface, these films seem unlikely candidates for a column on romantic love. One, called Little Man, follows a lesbian couple who choose to have a surrogate mother give birth to their child. The birth mother develops life-threatening medical problems and the baby, named Nicholas, is delivered by C-section 100 days early. Weighing one pound, he is given virtually no chance for survival. Yet filmmaker Nicole Conn, who with partner Gwendolyn Baba arranged for the child, fights with everything she’s got to keep Nicholas alive.

The other film, Young@Heart, follows a group of seniors from New England who, nearing the end of their lives, travel around the U.S. and Europe singing alternative rock songs in a chorus by the same name. What keeps the film from being sappy is the enthusiasm with which they sing songs they wouldn’t think of listening to, and the deep friendships that develop as they stumble, then soar on tunes like The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

Is the attachment of a parent for a child, or a friend for a close friend, much different from the bond between two lovers? I think not.

Romantic love can be as fierce – and as occasionally delusional – as a mother’s love for her preemie, or the bond between two 80-year-old men who assure each other that the other sings like Caruso.

It steals our time and attention away from others we love, just as it did for Nicole Conn. Conn lived at the hospital with Nicholas for five months, fighting any attempt to take her baby off life-support and almost wrecking her relationship with Baba, who opposed her decision.

Loving someone makes us vulnerable to loss. The seniors of Young@Heart, which was formed in 1982, know a lot about that. One example: In 2006, while their documentary was being filmed, two of their long-term members died the week before a concert. A former chorus member suffering from congestive heart failure, Fred Knittle, had prepared to return to sing a song with Bob Salvini, one of the two who died.

On the night of the concert, with no one knowing whether he could pull it off alone, Knittle walked across the stage carrying his oxygen tank, sank into a folding chair and sang a tribute to Salvini. The song was Coldplay’s “Fix It,” and it included these lines:

When you lose something you can’t replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste….
When you’re too in love to let it go
But if you never try you’ll never know
Just what you’re worth
Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

We don’t shy away from the idea of having a baby, someday, as emotionally risky as that can be. We hope to stay connected to friends as we get older, even knowing that we’ll lose some. Perhaps romantic love might not intimidate us so if we thought of it as belonging along the same continuum of other attachments that, for all their potential pain, so enrich our lives.