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The song begins pleasantly enough. In a track from her album “Already, Always,” English folk singer Bess Atwell sings sweetly about walking in the rain to her significant other’s house, wondering if her contentment means “I love you more than I thought I did before.”
But in the midst of pondering this desire and where it points, hesitation interrupts: “But what if love is not enough to keep us?”
Atwell’s question is one that many people ask these days, perhaps especially younger adults, whose openness to self-giving love and permanent commitment has been undermined by the prevalence of divorce amongst their parents. Love, from this perspective, indeed seems like it is not enough. It makes promises it cannot keep, and it can even cause more hurt than the good it brings about.
In such a climate of fear and uncertainty, many are deterred from following love to where it logically leads — for as Chesterton noted, “it is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.” Better to have never loved at all — or to have loved with limitations, which is to say the same thing — than to have loved and risked loss, goes the new wisdom of the age.
And yet, for those who don’t evade or deny it, the ache for a love that fully satisfies and lasts forever remains. What are we to make of it? Is it a compass pointing to nowhere, an unfulfillable longing and therefore a curse? Atwell entertains the possibility, the next line of her refrain wondering whether the promise of love is nothing but “the biggest joke the big man’s had, and we bear the brunt.”
But as convenient as it might be to explain away the longing for love as a divine hoax, a product of culture, or even a trick of evolutionary biology, something even more fundamental breaks through Atwell’s guarded skepticism. “I don’t want to go adrift,” she repeats several times at the conclusions of the song with increasing insistence (even imploration), before asking the song’s thematic question one last time.
Why, in the face of such evidence of the apparent impossibility of attaining it, does the longing for love persist? Why do we continue to expect something, as if the universe has promised it to us?
The Italian priest Luigi Giussani describes the sort of tension faced by Atwell and so many others today as a place of “impossible aspiration,” a desire for something that you nonetheless have lost hope you will ever possess. As Giussani says, this position is “not so much an openly negative option as it is like stopping oneself, bewildered, on the threshold of the true conclusion—it’s like being the prisoner of a query which continually reopens the wound.”
The desire for love constitutes the human person. To deny it outright is to reduce the person to an object; but to deny that it has a corresponding answer is to render our lives incoherent and without meaning.
The fact that there is so much fear and hesitation surrounding the decision to give ourselves away to someone in love these days, while problematic, is also an affirmation of the fundamental character of our desire for love. As Giussani says, “The more something involves the meaning of living, the more we fear affirming it.”
Our desire for love is not illusory; it is also not a hopeless burden. Rather, it reveals the deepest truth of who we are as human persons. A love that corresponds to this infinite desire exists, but it is true that the love our little hearts generate on their own steam “is not enough to keep us” faithful to it. This is not a flaw, but a feature. We need community and culture as invaluable supports. And, most fundamentally, we need God, who offers us a share of his own selfless love and is the one who our love ultimately desires.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
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