Feb. 9, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I would like to share with you a short poem which is, to put it mildly, my favorite love poem. If you look it up, you will find it all over the internet attributed to Frida Kahlo, who most certainly is not the author. It is such a great poem, originally written in Spanish, that few people would accept that it was written by a Latina grad student in Texas, but, Estefanía Mitre is the author of this magical piece, in which she asserts:
“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled,
with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste
and the demons that won’t let you sleep.
You deserve a lover who makes you feel safe,
who can consume this world whole
if he walks hand in hand with you;
someone who believes that his embraces are a perfect match with your skin.
You deserve a lover who wants to dance with you,
who goes to paradise every time he looks into your eyes
and never gets tired of studying your expressions.
You deserve a lover who listens when you sing,
who supports you when you feel shame and respects your freedom;
who flies with you and isn’t afraid to fall.
You deserve a lover who takes away the lies
and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
Three or four cars ago, I indulged a long-postponed dream. When my daughter had become a licensed driver and had a car of her own, and I no longer had to haul her and a half a dozen of her friends around town, I traded my Volvo station wagon in for a 2-seater convertible. It caused a buzz in the church, of course, in much the way that growing a beard or wearing a suit that is not black or navy blue causes a stir. They said it was a Mid-life crisis, a childish indulgence, but call it whatever you want . . . I loved it.
In fact, I loved it so much that after about a month of driving it, I called the used car dealer where I had bought it to thank him for selling it to me and to tell him how happy it had made me. There was silence on the other end of the line, finally he said, “And?” “That’s it,” I said, “I just wanted to thank you again for selling it to me.”
This gray-haired old hand in the car industry had evidently never sold a used car and had the buyer call and say, “thank you.” He was sincerely speechless. Experience had taught him to expect the worst. If you get a call from someone who just bought a used car from you, it was bound to be a complaint because people don’t call used car salesmen with good news.
Oddly enough, being a minister is a lot like being a used car salesman. No one ever scheduled an appointment with me to tell me that their kids are doing well in school, that they have never had a run-in with the law, and that they are dating the most charming and intelligent people. No one ever drops by to say, “Just wanted to let you know that my wife and I are more hopelessly in love than we were ten years ago when you married us.”
Of course, I have no idea how many married couples are really happy, or how many are just quietly tolerating one another. I’m afraid that many settle into a kind of quiet acquiescence. The thrill is gone, the passion as cooled, and, over time, even the curiosity goes away as you become so familiar with one another that you not only finish one another’s sentences, but you can become irrationally irritated by the fact that she is always losing her keys, and he never remembers to lock the back door.
Poets and playwrights have always waxed eloquent about romantic love, but in all honesty, for most of human history, being in love or being happy was not all that relevant in marriage. Most marriages were either directly arranged or substantially arranged and couples stayed together out of a survival need as much as for religious values or reputation.
When homes were lit by oil lamps, food was cooked on a wood fire stove, and clothes were washed in a tub and hung on a clothesline to dry, whether your husband had gotten a little big in the middle or your wife’s breasts sagged was not something you spent time worrying about. A hundred years ago, pastors did not hear many couples coming in to complain that there were just not happy… that their marriage wasn’t fulfilling. In the days before refrigeration, they had to worry more about whether the meat in the smokehouse was safe and edible and whether their old horse was going to make it through another winter.
It was World War II that began to see the American family in rapid evolution. Women were forced from their homes into offices and manufacturing floors. Prior to the war, women mostly had contact with their family and a few neighbors and church members but in the world of commerce in the midst of global conflict, and their world had changed, and they were not necessarily eager to go back to the old ways when the war was over.
I wasn’t alive then but I grew up hearing sermons and religious debates that were focused on getting women back into their homes.
A married woman with children who tried to keep a career was portrayed as being inherently irresponsible, wayward, maybe even sinful.
My father came home from the war and got a job with the newly formed Rural Electrification Corporation, the REA, and for the next 40 years he was involved with stretching the copper wires that made modern life, with all of its labor-saving appliances and conveniences possible. My mother bounced back and forth between being a fulltime housewife or being a secretary at our church.
This time period when genders mixed more not only saw the divorce rate rise, but in recent years, it has seen more and more people choosing to live alone. More than half of Americans are not married now. Women no longer need a husband to bring home the bacon, chop the fire wood, and slaughter the pig and they don’t even need a husband to have and raise a child. And I don’t need someone to iron my clothes, cook my dinner, or explain to me why almost everything that I say or do is wrong . . . maybe that was just my home life. I don’t mean to speak for you.
I am generalizing, of course, but for most of human history, family stability was largely maintained by the fact that there was no other practical choice. Families stayed together for unconscious psychological reasons, being the pack animals that we are, but we also stayed together out of economic necessity and for sheer survival. For the most part, that chapter of human history is in the past.
Now couples largely stay together because they choose to do so. So why do they choose to do so? There is a lot of sexual impulse that we inherit through evolution and that is certainly a big part of it, at least in the beginning. But this is one thing that same sex couples and opposite sex couples have in common: sexual frequency starts at a high point and declines pretty quickly. It may be uncomfortable to talk about, but it is a nearly universal event.
There is an old Italian proverb that says: In the first five years of marriage, you are lovers. In the second five years you are friends. In the third five years you become like brother and sister. And in the next five you become like two sisters. Now, as we tend to live longer than our ancestors, the question we might pose to anyone who starts towards marriage after their child bearing years are past and when their careers have peaked or been put to bed, what is it that would make you sacrifice your independence and some measure of your self determination to enter into a seven-day-a-week partnership under one roof?
Again, I think of this on a personal level. Having spent most of my adult life as a single person, what would make me ever change my marital status? What would make it worth it? And I have an answer for that. Meaning.
There was a wonderful moment in Robin William’s movie, the Dead Poets’ Society, in which he tells his students, “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
My late parents were married for more than 60 years, and I do not doubt that there were moments of real emotional connection between them, but as an observer of nearly 50 of those years, their marriage was about function. They were Puritans with a Protestant work ethic that would have killed Paul Bunyan.
They worked, and cleaned, and cooked, and mowed, they planted, harvested, canned, and froze, but what I never saw them do was read to one another. If it were not for the daily newspaper that each held in silence before going to bed, I would not have been sure that they even knew how to read. And, really, if you know how to read but you just don’t, how is that different from being illiterate?
My parents and most of their generation, were focused on function, sometimes, just survival. They obeyed the laws, paid their taxes, raised their children, went to church. They retired quietly so that they could criticize the government full time until, in the fullness of time, or maybe a decade later, they passed away. I would like to believe that their 60 days together gave their life a lot of meaning but a marriage like theirs does not look attractive to me.
I have been single for 30 years. I tried hard to make marriage work and since my divorce, I have dated and a couple of times I have even felt some hope that we might make it to the altar. But being past the time of thinking about having children, I have held out for a relationship that would be a marriage of equals, a real partnership that was intellectually, spiritually, and even politically compatible, but even more, absolutely dripping with romance. And that, I have not found, in spite of a lot of looking and disappointing trial and error.
At my age, giving up would have seemed to be the most logical option but I will share with you that this Valentine’s message is pre-recorded because I am spending this time in Thailand with my significant other whom I hope will only continue to be my more and more significant other until we make the final decision to cast aside caution and tie the knot.
Hui is 56 and has never been married. I am 68 and have never had what anyone could call a “successful” relationship but we are both nervously and enthusiastically getting closer to making that hand in hand jump off the cliff.
Those who have been listeners of mine for more than a few years know that I generally return to the writings of the great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard when life gets real. The most influential thing in Kierkegaard’s life was his broken engagement to the woman he loved more than life, Regine Olson. Kierkegaard was, it is fair to say, psychologically a mess. He was cursed with severe depression, but he loved Regine and found reason for hope and joy in her. But his depression made him doubt that he could make her happy and so he broke off their wedding plans and left the country for a couple of years to let her get on with her life. Which, she did.
Kierkegaard was the one who couldn’t get on with his life. He obsessed about her. Wrote books about the painful choice of between being a philosopher or a husband. At long last, he decided to go back to Copenhagen and ask Regine to take him back, only to discover that she had married someone else while Soren had been in Berlin obsessing about his own issues.
He wrote in his journal, shortly before his untimely death, “To live without love is a mistake for which there is no reparation, either in this life or in the life to come.”
I have returned to that quote over and over these past three decades. I have felt the desire to share life meaningfully with a partner but my own perfectionism has kept me from ever allowing myself to take that step.
I’m not sure that I have really moved past that perfectionism but, I believe that I have found someone so nearly perfect that she can help me to finish the journey.
Because, men and women, believe me, to live without love is a mistake. Single life has its moments, but none of them rival being in love. To wall ourselves off from meaningful connection is a mistake for which there is no reparation either in this life or in the life to come.
So, I cling to a bit of poetry. The whole of the verse is magical, but it ends, as good poems always do, in breath-taking crescendo:
“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”
You deserve a lover who brings you coffee, the most basic and mundane act of grace in a sleepy household. The first one up brings the other a cup of “wake up, it’s morning.” It is just the civil thing to do. But it is a hero who takes away the lies of the world, who is strong enough to bring you hope. Hope is not a cup of coffee. Hope is defiance in the face of contrary evidence. It is a reason to believe even when the world is dark and full of lies.
But a lover who will read poetry to you, that is a lover who will share their heart. Who will let you see their weakness and their brilliance. Someone who will read poetry to you as you drift off to sleep will be there in the morning, and will bring you coffee when you are in your last days, and you will greet your mortality with contentment.
