Love, Goodness and Freedom

I am holding a new issue of The Day and reading the articles on authority and responsibility, how to defend freedom, how to protect our children… And I have read everything but my thoughts keep coming back to the front page. There, under the heading “Diary,” in an unnoticeable right bottom corner there is a note. It is only twenty lines, five-six words in each. A person, completely unfamiliar to me, is trying to sum up a major part of the life. You are reading and feeling that each word is like a tear. If the person shared his pain with people, apparently, it is very difficult to stand the pain alone, and the person wants to hear or read a couple of words of consolation, compassion and understanding… That is not an easy thing – compassion and understanding are often feigned, and you can be deeply hurt when you learn that somebody close to you has been untrue. There is also the desire to give others a piece of advice after you have made a conclusion of your life. It is more difficult. A person’s nature is so unique that what appears useful for one, is useless for another, and may even be fatal for someone else.

Bitter words: love, devote yourself … and get a stabbed into your heart. And then,

“You love, devote yourself, get married, give birth to the kids and then you realize – everything that you do, does not come back to you. And the divorce is not far off.”

This story is old as the world. Love towards a man or a woman. Love towards your kids. Yet, unfortunately, unreciprocated. Somebody wants freedom, freedom from me, from the responsibilities linked to me, and for me this means loneliness.

I start remembering stories connected to intimate love, marriage and family, which I know not from the literature but from real life. The memory recollects many of them, several hundreds – due to a good memory and peculiarities of my profession: a teacher and a priest. Unfortunately, the situation, when the one who loves is betrayed and “stabbed in the heart,” is not rare. Let us start from the Bible story of Christ.

And here are the first three life stories that I remember.

She loved her husband and lived only for him. She completely forgot about herself but he left her for another woman. She and her ex-husband worked together for the same company. She asked him, “Will you come back to me?” He decidedly said, “No!” In few minutes she opened a balcony door and jumped out from the seventh or eighth floor. She left a young daughter. The daughter grew up, I taught her German. She took from her father, not her mother.

Another story. He loved his wife so much and trusted her, and she cheated on him with every man in sight in a very shameless way, that all the friends knew. Finally, he caught her in the act and learned about all her “adventures.” A grown-up man cried like a baby and asked his friends, “Why did she do it?” It was difficult to realize it for them too.

The third story. A couple lived a happy life. In his sixties, the husband got a mistress. They did not divorce, but the relationships were spoiled, she could not forgive him – especially since, she was young, she had success among men but remained faithful to her husband. It is painful to look at this couple now. The abovementioned examples are horrible cases of “stabbing into the heart,” but each of us, probably, knows such stories and can continue this sad series in different variations.

Love towards another person, until recently a stranger, is a spontaneous feeling; it appears unexpectedly and also unexpectedly, sometimes gradually, fades away. Some compare love with a sickness, some – with psychosis. They say that because of excessive love a person loses a feeling of freedom. It can be worse, if this feeling disappears for one, and remains for the other. One feels free and another is tightly attached to the object of love. Some manage to find a smart, optimal for both parties or for three parties (he, she and the children) decision, and some act selfishly – the most important is that I feel good. And then comes the inevitable “stabbing in the heart.” Actually a rational solution of the old problem can be perceived this way, if your love is still alive, but love towards you died, your heart is bleeding anyway... You can feel deep and inconsolable grief. Love is a phenomenon that causes pain sooner or later. You are to be ready for it but the heart does not want to accept this. “They loved each other for long time and faithfully, and died on the same day” is from fairy tales and fiction. A different thing happens way more often in life. I know some stories, where the couple lived together for their entire life without fights, unfaithfulness or incidents. It is the generations of my grandpas and grandmas who married in an old-fashioned manner, only with the permission of parents and often according to their choosing. I am not convinced that those couples were truly happy. Some of them were frankly unhappy with each other, but they endured – the divorce was not fashionable in those times. Marriage was considered to be obligatory and bound by God. That is why many people followed the eternal rule: what was brought together by God, a man cannot disconnect. It is not by accident that for many centuries there was a struggle to free marriage, opening it for love. But freedom is the right to divorce. Many people supposed that freeing marriages from mercenary, and creating them on love alone, will solve all the problems and will make everybody happy. It is not so. Some problems were solved, other came in their place.

Is there any solution? “It is necessary to be loved, not to love.” Is it a solution? Yes, we can hope that “a habit will come, then respect and after – love.” I want to ask: if both people do not love each other but they hope that the other partner loves them? There is no device that would indicate the presence of love in the partner’s body, as a dosimeter indicates radiation. Is it not a reason why families have problems so soon, because each of them hopes that they are loved more than they love? But sooner or later the truth is revealed and mutual disappointment arouses. Everything is not so simple.

There are problems with parental love. A lot of parents feel a strong commitment to children and grandchildren for their whole life, but the children and grandchildren feel it until they mature, and then this commitment, unfortunately, weakens. It is not so difficult to find an explanation for it. Although we convince ourselves that we love our parents, we do not manage to call them more often, or to come visit them for a few days. All the time there are some important reasons stopping us. And only when our parents leave forever do we realize that we should spent more time with them. Repentance comes but it is always too late. Our kids too, probably, will understand everything, when we will not be around.

What to do? Maybe, first of all, to love ourselves? Or even better – love me, not I love you?

Memory obligingly provides me with other stories. She sensibly got married by hoping that the habit would turn into respect and love is not far from respect. Unfortunately, love came but not towards the husband, but a colleague. Or a boss. Or a neighbor. Or a stranger. When we still have raging hormones, the heart does not tolerate a vacuum, but often chooses the object of love not listening to the laws of moral and reason. And love is far from respect because these are the phenomena of different natures. We respect with our minds, according to values, but we love by subconsciousness – different mechanisms are at work. Love turns the brain off quite often. Thinking is constant and rational. Love passes and is sometimes ill at ease – how could I have loved that? By the way, a lot of women explain adultery by “I married the one I did not love but the one who paid attention to me and seemed to be an appropriate one, but the one, whom I loved, married somebody else.”

And again, my memory brings back other examples. In these stories people were happy without expecting or demanding to be loved. He loved and did good things for the beloved just because it was pleasant. True, people often pay evil for good. The poet Yevtushenko once wrote, “You, people, always spit at those who wish you good.” But it is not true, rather, not the whole truth. Not always do they spit, only sometimes. Many people do not value love and goodness, done with the expectation of a payback. A lot of people do not want to owe or to be dependent, even in return for a good thing. There are people, who do not believe that good things are done just because, and they look for a trap or a mean trick behind anything good. There are people, who suppose that love and goodness are weakness and try to take advantage of those who do good. One of the homeless tramps, whom I tried to help, claimed that helping him is my duty and started demanding regular money payments from me. It happens like this too.

But we need to do good, even if we unintentionally make a mistake and face ingratitude. A good thing, made for someone, goes on. It is possible that our love towards our children will not come back but it will live on – our kids will love their kids. And this parental love will go on and on, from generation to generation. The children, who did not feel love in childhood towards themselves, often cannot love later and sometimes they do not have parental instincts. But some pedagogues and psychologists suppose that your kids will treat you the same as you treat your parents and the parents of your spouse. This statement sounds quite reasonable, so those whose parents are still alive can verify it.

But you need to love yourself too. At least in order not to be sorry that you lived your whole life for another, ungrateful person. The Bible says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” So, you need to love yourself too. It means that by loving your life partner and your children, you should not forget about your own life and try not to postpone things. It is necessary to try to make everything possible so that the ones we love would respect us and our needs. Happy is he who lives his life with pleasure in full extent, without postponing for later. This “later” can come too late. Or not at all.

Actually, the experience of many generations shows that happiness of those who love, and those who are loved, comes not from blind love, but from wise love. Extensive goodness and devotion bring much harm and turn into evil, because they breed arrogance, selfishness and cruelty in another person. The kids, who are fussed over like a child over a new toy, often grow up into angry selfish people, and the parents become the first victims. A good deed should be correspondent to a need, should be well-timed, strictly addressed and reasonably justified. Unmerited good corrupts. We should not give alms to a beggar, but try to give him a job so that he would earn his bread. It would bring him more benefit.

The stories I know show that long-term family happiness and mutual love in marriage requires wisdom and mutual work for its preservation, not importunity, intrusion, reproaches or complaints. Mutual love is a great happiness, but one not given to all. And we should be grateful for this happiness, even if it lasted only a few years, as it is difficult to avoid worries and disappointments in life. That is how our life is made. There are the words of Leo Tolstoy, spoken not about love, but respect, honesty and goodness. They are still relevant. I copied them into my notebook 30 years ago and I am constantly convinced of their worth.

“It is funny for me to remember that I thought just like you, that it is possible to create a happy and honest little world, where it is possible to live quietly without mistakes, repentance or confusion and do only good neatly without hurry. It is funny!..

In order to live honestly, it is necessary to burst, get confused, fight, make mistakes, start and quit and then start again and quit again, and eternally fight and lose. Calmness is mean to the soul.”