What is this strange force that has so much power over us? Why does it have to be such a big mystery? And why do we have so much trouble giving it, accepting it, making it last? We're figuring it out, piece by piece. Starting with: What makes us fall for the people we fall for, and why are we so surprised when the oh-so-perfect lover turns out to be stubborn, sloppy, unreasonable, predictable—in a word, human?
The Test: Richard M. Cohen finds sustenance in partnership
The Encounter: Have you met Ed, the EMT to be worshipped?
The Mentor: Hill Harper pays it forward
The Un-Couple: Being friends with an ex
Does It Have to Be Work? James Collins savors romance
The Bedrock: Elizabeth Strout indulges a new kind of adoration
The Other: Sharon Olds waxes poetic about selflessness

My sense of self shifts with the tremors. In the lens onto the world through which any seriously sick person peers—in my own case, battles with MS and colon cancer—fog blurs the lines marking the road and showing the way. Detours define the journey. Perception becomes reality and creates distortions. Chronic conditions take over systems and sensibilities deep within a body and mind.

As we struggle to survive and stay on our feet, how can we love? I often feel alone, even as I am surrounded by a loving family. I retreat within myself. To feel so bad and give something as good as unconditional love tests what is important. Self-absorption is out there, quicksand that can pull us down and away from the people we hold dear.

I never will love myself. The idea of self-love seems mythical, and what I see in the mirror disturbs me. But I can love my life. Maybe that is where I must begin. To find the joy inside my life is not drilling for water in the desert. My wife and children offer a happiness that would otherwise seem elusive. That cannot be taken away by disease.

Neither physical nor emotional pain will fertilize love. Family does. Given a pulpit, I would preach to citizens of sickness that life is made precious by what we give to others, that love is the currency of the realm and the current that warms. If it is real, that electricity will power any house.

We must decide what we need love to be. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire offer no insight for me. The chronically healthy can live that 1930s Hollywood version of perfect love. The physically flawed cannot. The whole person must be more than the sum of flawed parts.

That man or woman who guides the other to clear the eyes and know what matters becomes an extraordinary character. My wife and I have traveled well beyond cosmetic love. We live in the real world and ask only what reasonably can be delivered. Love is picking up the other when the times come. And come they do.

There is no soundtrack to our relationship. Caring, and being there, are silent operations. Love is a form of hard work the young can not foresee. Equal measures of discipline and devotion are key ingredients for the rich stew simmering on the stove in the house where I live.

There's nothing so unusual about loving the person who rescues you from the worst pain of your life, but my love for the man I know only as "Ed, the EMT guy" isn't that kind of love. True, before Ed stormed into my bedroom, the pain I was enduring was unlike any I'd ever endured; and true, shortly after Ed's arrival, the pain was all gone. But to say I love Ed because he had something to do with this turn of events is to place the emphasis on the pain, not the man.

Fifteen minutes earlier, I'd been calmly packing my things, between widely spaced, no-big-deal contractions that had been going on, no big deal, all day. Now, with almost no warning, I was on my hands and knees bellowing like a speared elephant, my 3-year-old was still in the bathtub, our sitter was still in a cab on her way to our house, my husband was still under the befuddled impression that I'd only screamed, "Call 911!" so we could hitch a no-stoplights ride in an ambulance to the hospital instead of trundling along in our car. Only Ed—bursting into the room so soon after the call had been placed that my husband was literally still babbling into the phone—seemed to realize, like me, what the real deal was: that I was having the baby right there and right then.

Did I love him already? Only for the reasons anybody like me at that moment would love anybody like him: because he was there, with the promise of rescue. But my specific love for specifically him was just seconds away. Like the pain, like the baby, it exploded upon me in the moment when he paused to say gently, as I was writhing and swearing and clawing, "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I have to take off your pants."

Then he yanked off my pants, his eyebrows shot up, and he yelled, like a football coach, "Push!" That was it—the baby hurtled like a cannonball onto the bed.

Of course, I loved the baby, Elliot, too—but that wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that my gratitude toward Ed was more like adoration. In the euphoric aftermath, we took his picture, and for weeks afterward I gazed at it, and, nine months later, I often still do. Because he saved me from pain? Technically, that was Elliot's doing. No, I love Ed because, with the grace, flair, and timing of some sort of Gene Kelly of EMTs, he gave me a perfect moment—compassionate, hilarious, and complete. 

I come from a legacy of service. My grandfather on my mother's side was a pharmacist who served the African-American community in a small town in South Carolina. My father's side, the same thing: My grandfather had a farm and was also a doctor who built the first hospital in a four-state radius, specifically to serve African-American families.

About 12 years ago, I started getting asked to give talks to young people. I was invited because of my background—public schools in Iowa and California, then to Brown and two graduate degrees from Harvard, and now an acting career. Young guys and women would ask, "Hey. You're talking about goals and dreams, and I'm the first person in my family who has a chance to go to college, but I don't have any money. You said I could do anything—so what can I do?" And I'd say, "You know, I can't answer that question in a sound bite. Go stand over here." By the time I'd finish with these talks, I'd have 40, 50 kids waiting over there. I would try to exchange e-mail addresses with them, and I would try to do some type of e-mail mentoring.

I can't tell you how many young people I meet who, when I ask how they're doing, mumble something. They can't even look an adult in the eye. They don't feel that they're worthy of the connection. So I say, "You're magnificent. You're brilliant. There's nothing you can't do." I ask them, "How many times has an adult male ever said, 'I love you,' and expected nothing in return?" A good six to eight times out of 10, the answer is never. In their whole life. You have to remember most of the kids I talk to are being raised by single moms, so Nana's around, Auntie, Mom—and they say, "Baby, I love you"—but oftentimes the men aren't there. That's what all my work is, the talks, the mentoring, the two books I wrote of the best advice I'd been given and had to give: It's love and hugs on paper—that's all the books are.

I was fortunate that I had people in my life who demanded that I live up to my potential, and that's what I try to do with the young people I'm fortunate enough to meet. I tell them they're excellent, so they have to excel. I always ask them what my uncle Russell used to ask me: "What are your grades?" When they tell me, I say, "How are we going to turn those into straight A's? I can see that you're a straight-A student." And they've never heard anyone say that to them before.

Young people are extremely savvy and they can see through b.s. in a second, so they know if you have it in your heart or not. People ask if this is exhausting, but I believe that love expands. As you give love out, it's received and reciprocated—and it grows. That's the beauty of it. Love is an energy. You can feed it to people, and they in turn feed it to others, and eventually it comes back.

— As told to Mamie Healey

For 30 years, S. has filled the dual role of favorite tennis partner and best friend. Eternally tall, lean, and sinewy, his appearance varies only with an on-again, off-again beard. Now in his mid-50s, he must have aged a tad, but I can't see it. I refuse to.

In our 20s, we sampled romantic involvement, from the casual to the deathly serious. Having both hurt the other grievously, we're even. For we've each fallen in love with the other—but not at the same time.

My turn: We went out for Chinese. Neither of us had tried it, so we sprang for Peking duck. Before the first course, S. announced that, as lovers, we were through. We sat before the Mandarin pancakes. We sat before the soup. We ate nothing. We said nothing. We canceled the other courses and paid the bill in full. In silence, I fetched my bike from his apartment and barely made it to the street before collapsing. My wailing was so primal that, contrary to oblivious New York custom, a woman leaned out an upper window to ask if I was all right.

His turn: Walking onto the tennis court, I informed S. with cheerful brutality that I'd started up with an old flame. I hit him a ball. He stood there. I hit him another ball. He stood there. He could no more play tennis than I'd been able to stomach Peking duck. Later he confided that when I threw in the romantic towel, he'd considered suicide—and S. is not a drama queen. He asked why I didn't find him suitable, and I will never forgive myself for telling him.

What brought us both back? Courtly love. However injured, neither of us could bear the prospect of losing our ideal tennis partner, thereby destroying a perfect match at least as hard to find as the romantic kind. Looking back I wonder if we instinctively realized that we were meant to be best friends, so far a more lasting tie than passion—more durable, more constant.

Any man I've been involved with has grown jealous of S.; S.'s women have grown jealous of me. After all, a gentle attraction persists.

Our dynamic does not, quite, mirror the feeling between me and my girlfriends. I consider S. a handsome man, as S. also finds my company physically pleasing. Yet the electricity is muted, domestic, without urgency, like the hum of a refrigerator. There's nothing scary about a refrigerator. Our history has inoculated us against temptation. We did that. We're not curious. Our spouses are safe. So after years of understandable wariness, my husband and S.'s wife have graciously accepted this friendship as part of the landscape.

If I need to dissect a fight with my brother, I go to S. If I need a recipe for skate, I go to S. If I need to hit for two hours against a nefarious net game, I definitely go to S. We have appetites for each other's tiniest stories—the best kind. We are honest to the point of appalling. Because anything either thinks is by definition of interest, we are never bored, never boring.

Friends rarely resort to the L word. But when you flush with joy laying eyes on a man and battle a continual, buried dread that he will die, what do you call it but love? 

Much has been learned about the difficulties that can arise between two people who are in love—and how to address them. We now know how to get our own needs met. We know how to establish boundaries. We know how to use "I" statements. We know that making a relationship a success involves a huge amount of effort. How many times have you heard a therapist, or a friend, or a friend who thinks he or she is a therapist say that a relationship is hard work? It is a constant refrain—"a relationship is hard work." I have heard this so many times that when anyone says the word relationship, I now see an image of sweating slaves in loincloths pulling huge stones up the side of a pyramid.

Doubtlessly, all these insights are very valuable. But I sometimes wonder whether, while we are toiling away at our long checklist of relationship tasks, we have forgotten to do something that arguably is as important: actually loving the person we love.

If only it were that easy, you might say. How can we actually love the person we love when we are burdened by resentment and fear and insecurity and anger and narcissism and hostility and self-loathing and bouts of total irrationality—as when, for example, we become furious with the person we love whenever she does something like call us at the office while we are staying late to meet a hugely important deadline to ask again how to work the new DVD player so she can watch Something's Gotta Give for the 10,000th time?

Well, it might help at least to keep the goal in sight. These days "relationships" seem all travel—canceled flights, lost luggage, rude clerks—and no actual arrival. The point, though, is to enjoy Paris, not to trudge endlessly between concourses at the Charlotte airport. Moreover, there are times when we do love without working so damn hard—when we love a child or a friend or an aunt or a dog or a painting or a tree or the stars—and we can draw on those experiences, I think, to love someone, or fall back in love, before both parties achieve perfect and mutual sanity. Our feelings for our beloved will always be deeper than our feelings for an aunt or a tree (although not necessarily for a dog), and they will always be more complicated, but by recalling what simple, pure, joyous love is actually like, it may be possible to reproduce it under more challenging circumstances.

Love was once associated with joy, fun, and happiness, and it would be nice if it were so again.

Love?

It can make your mouth dry out so fast your lips stick together. It can make you dizzy in just seconds. It can make you nauseated. It can make you nuts. That's how I felt when I looked out a bus window and saw my baby in a stroller being pushed by her babysitter. I wanted to yell, "Stop! Stop the bus, stop the babysitter, stop the traffic—let me grab that child and keep her safe!"

She was 3 weeks old. I was sleep deprived, weepy, and doing a poor job with breastfeeding. ("You're too nervous," the La Leche woman told me serenely.) My mother-in-law had said it was time for me to leave the apartment. "Go do something for yourself," she'd directed. She arranged for a college student to babysit. Dutifully, I had taken the bus to a museum and sat with a cup of coffee in their café. It puzzled me to think of myself, just a few months before, as a young woman wandering happily through this museum alone. Now the place seemed eerie as a tomb. Did I want to go home? I didn't know what I wanted.

Back on the bus, I looked out the window and thought how everyone on the sidewalk seemed free. Then I thought, "Hey, wait a minute, isn't that the babysitter? Isn't that a baby carriage she's pushing?" I thought, "Wait, do babysitters just take babies out for a walk like they would a dog?" As the bus groaned past, I had a fleeting glimpse of my daughter's tiny face, out in the world of traffic, commotion everywhere.

I had always wanted children. Partly, I wanted someone else to be more important than me; my Self was a burdensome thing to keep carrying around. But I'd been missing that Self since my daughter's birth. I hadn't known it would be so eclipsed by the constant worry—had she burped, slept, peed? ("Sleep when she sleeps," the doctor said. I couldn't. I was too stunned. There were moments in those early days that when she cried, I cried too.) But that day I saw her from the window of the bus, I almost yelped aloud—not just with worry, with love. Minutes later I sat on the front stoop, and when the babysitter pushed the carriage around the corner, I felt a huge billowing of love that sat like a gigantic, soft helium balloon on my shoulders. I didn't know a person could feel that love, it was so large. But then—a few weeks later, I watched my little daughter wake from her nap, kick her little feet. And—whoosh!—that feeling of love grew exponentially. This kept happening as the weeks went by, and each time I was amazed. How could love be this big? That enormous, soft helium balloon got bigger and higher, until my love filled the skies. Boundless, as they say.

Where has that left the Self? Oh, hit by some comets over the years. Obliterated, practically. Maybe I should say transcended.
 

Everything


Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born—
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything goes—the earth, the firmament—
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

*****

Where this poem came from, I'm not sure. I think I was daydreaming about our species—every potential member of it who ever lived or didn't. And about miscarriages, and babies born with sometimes insurmountable challenges.

When I wrote the first line, I didn't know where the poem would go. (I think it would not have gone where it did if I had not known families in which a child died.)

And then I was putting poems together into a new book—my "mother book"—One Secret Thing. A lot of the poems are personal, and I didn't want the book to feel as if it was about just one set of lives. And this poem, "Everything," sort of rose to the top, to put at the beginning of the book, like a dedication.

The poem wasn't about an "I"; it looks outward. And maybe that's something that we become more able to see as we get older—or I may be a late bloomer—that love looks outward, toward the other. What we love most truly isn't our own condition (as parent, or child, or partner, or friend) of being in love, but the actual other people, with their mysterious intransigent natures!