Forever love: So impossible?
Do you want to dance with me? She looks up at him, she smiles. “Yes”, she replies (with), putting her hands on his shoulders (he shudders). And the slow begins. She is so close, he feels his body against him. His heart is accelerating. He wants to start the conversation, but he does not know what to say. He the impetus, the talker. Here he is disarmed. This story happened in the good old days of the balls of Saturday evening: the boys crossed the girls; they flirted; sometimes couples were formed. Some time later, these two were lovers. Later still, one child is born, then another. Much later, their children met love in their turn. And a new generation of children is born. Since their first meeting, a lot of time has passed. Miracle, love stayed.
This romance is not a novel fiction with rose water or a soap opera, it’s a true story. Mine. It freed me from everything that I think I know about humans, including this imperious law that would like the passion of love lasts only a time. It is true that past the period of euphoria, where everyone wants to believe in “great love”, the trial of life are responsible for recalling the real: the division of tasks, dirty socks, the work of each and the trajectories that diverge, dreams that do not match, children, their diapers and newsletters, bills to pay, small annoyances, real disputes, disenchantment, infidelities, habits, bodies that are damaged, desire who is dulled, hearts hardening, etc. There are a thousand obstacles to love: they have been deciphered by psychologists, sexologists, demographers and other disenchantment specialists. Just look at the curves of breaks and divorces. The result is overwhelming. But sometimes the magic is prolonged; well beyond sociological burdens. Nobody knows the recipe for eternal love, but it exists. The philosopher André Gorz fell in love with his Dorine. It was in the 1940s, she was 23. Him, 25, he wrote him the most beautiful love letters:
“You have just turned 82 (…). You are always beautiful, graceful and desirable. (…). I love you more than ever”.
And as the incurable disease was going to take away the woman of his life, they put an end to their day, together, glued together (“I carry in me an overflowing void that only fills your tight body against mine” , he wrote a little earlier). Some say that love is nothing but a fiction that wraps a veil of romanticism with real human relationships (sex, attachment, social bonds). “Without songs or novels, there would be no love”, writes Nicolas Tavaglione in his Philosophical ABC-Book (2018).
So love would be a literary fiction? What if it was something deeply animal? In animals too, there are lasting loves. In the wolves or the gannets, the couples remain faithful for life. The dogs themselves have this ability to fall in love with their master, exclusively, as no human can possibly do. “Love is the infinite within reach of poodles”, said Celine.
What is love in the end? A fiction to which one likes to believe, or mysterious alchemy made in the pot of evolution? What does it matter! When it falls on you and outrageously breach the ordinary laws of everyday life, you do not know who to believe: the experiment or the theory, the rule or its exception … Anyway, it is better to stop here. Because when we are in love, we are quickly pushed to say nonsense.
