Simcha Fisher on love

Makes me think of how, in marriages, the spouses do confer the sacrament on each other---but it is not merely in the wedding vows --but continually as they grow together.

Simcha writes:

My teenage daughter is very interested in the question, “What is love?”
Well, aren’t we all?  She’s heard that love isn’t just a feeling, but then what is it—what kind of thing?  I first floundered around with some disastrously hippie-dippie-sounding definitions:  love is a force, an energy, a power.  Then I overcompensated for that vagueness by making it sound like all love is tough love:  love is a decision, love is doing the right thing even when it feels bad.  True, but woefully incomplete.
Finally I gave up trying to tell her what kind of thing love is.  Instead, I said, let’s focus on what love does.
Love moves outward.  Love overflows.  Love refreshes.  And love is creative—it makes something new.  The love the Persons of the Trinity bears for each other is creative:  God is love, and so He made the world, so there would be more love, more to love.  I told my daughter that true human love is always a small reflection of this divine love.
Then I wondered, how do my husband and I measure up?  We’ve all heard that a couple is happy when each person fills in where the other lacks:  where one person fails, the other steps up; where one excels, the other makes way.  Sort of a jigsaw puzzle view of marriage, where the whole picture is revealed only when all the pieces are locked into their proper spots.
To some degree, this is how we do work:  I’m good at some things and lousy at others, and he’s lousy at some things and good at others.  If one spouse is willing and able to be in charge of a certain task, then, in the words of Bugs Bunny, “Iggity-aggity-oo. . . it’s YOURS.”  This system works as long as one spouse isn’t significantly lazier or more selfish than the other.  (Lucky for us, we’re both extremely lazy and selfish, so it’s fine.)
But I’m starting to realize that the parts of our lives that run the smoothest, and which seem to get better and better, are the parts in which we don’t stick to our assigned seats.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/what-is-this-thing-called-love/#ixzz1izQBdL64