love

i used to think that women love harder then men. that women are the experts in love.

i am not sure why i thought that. maybe because women are the ones who love chick flicks. or because when my parents' marriage was rocky, it seemed like my mom was the one who put all the effort into trying to save it. or maybe because women are the ones who seem to be starved for romance and struggle getting over men they've been in relationships with. the guys i knew in college were always playing down the relationships they were in and making funny comments about topics that touched subjects of love.

i started wondering about my philosophies when i saw what divorce did to my dad. for months life was sucked out of him. even though their marriage was a ghost for years before that, he stopped existing after my mom left. he has a girlfriend now and they've lived together for the past several years, but he said that he'll never love a woman like he loved my mom. i also saw how a different friend of mine set out to move past his very painful divorce and start dating but after 8 months of dating a girl, he realized that he is unable to love her.

i am not saying that people who've gotten divorced will not be able to have relationships and to love again. i am a strong believer that we all are capable of bouncing back, but i am saying that these two men have made me realize that men love. they love deeply and once they truly love a woman, i think their love is stronger than i ever realized. the love that men love women with, when they truly love, is so passionate and deep and true.

neil and i are reading a book called "covenant marriage" by gary chapman, i read this quote and it has really stuck in my mind, "man's need for intimacy is what motivated God to create eve and institute the marriage relationship." god didn't create eve first and then adam because eve needed someone to watch "elizabethtown" with, god created adam and saw how lonely he was, then he created eve. adam was the one who needed a parter and a companion. adam was the one who felt lonely, it wasn't eve. eve was the perfection, the crown of god's creation. she was created because adam needed her to feel complete. we were talking about this today, i didn't realize that adam felt lonely before sin. he was still in perfect harmony with god, this was at a time when they talked daily. and he still felt like something was missing.

maybe it's nothing new and i sound naive but it's a discovery for me that i knew in the back of my mind but it paints a different picture about what i thought about men.