Have we, as a people, lost the meaning and art of love that lasts a lifetime?
Yes.
Romance truly means the beauty and joy and quite frankly the thrill of falling hard, deep inside your soul, for another person. Then that feeling translates into a fabulous chase called “wooing”. Wooing is the delightful art of strategics to make the object of your desire to fall in love with you as much as you have fallen in love with him or her.
The end game, the prize, the goal, if followed through successfully, gains a mutual love that will carry the couple through hard times, boring times, tempting times. The couple will, despite getting on each others’ nerves far too often than they want to admit, will loyally defend one another against all outside attacks, will comfort one another in times of pain and heartbreak, will cherish one another to the point of painfully holding on to the bitter end when one must say goodbye as the other must leave for the next world.
My parents, Billy Joe and Florene, two farm kids from Oklahoma, fell in love at the tender ages of 16 and 17. They married at that age, had children starting in their early twenties, became grandparents at the youthful age of their early forties, and now, hang onto one another, fighting fiercely to continue this journey together. Last weekend I went to visit my mom. She has ovarian cancer. I had not seen her since she contracted the disease. I had heard that the end was near and I needed to get out there to see her. I also heard that my dad was in denial and that he could not accept the inevitable.
So I went.
Dad wheeled a creature in a wheelchair that I did not recognize. This creature had a mishaped face, ravaged by chemo, and bleak with expressionless emotion and death in her eyes. The shock was that my feisty mom looked like a woman who had given up.
My dad, however, looked like a man twenty years younger. He was full of cheer and full of a mission. I had not seen this in him for twenty years. He was not in denial, he was in war mode. He was going to carry my mom to victory.
And how he looked at her. He looked at her the way he looked at her when she was twenty. Over the years, women had tried to snare my dad away from my mom. My mom would point this out to him and he would look at her like she was crazy. As far as he could ration, what would any woman want with a baldy like him? When one time it became evident that even my dad had to see it, he was in shock. You see, it never occurred to him that infidelity was on the table. My mom, looked at my dad with humor and understanding. She used to tell me that Dad was like a puppy chasing a car, he looked, but if he caught the car he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Mom never doubted that Dad would stray. The thought never occurred to her to stray either.
That is love, that is romance.
Late into the first night of my visit I talked to Dad. He told me that he thought mom was going to die when she first went into surgery. He thought that he would not survive her leaving him. But when she made it through that fateful night that God spared her, Dad decided that nothing would stop him from doing everything he could to save her. He firmly looked at me with rugged determination, “Cathy,” he said, “When I worked for Defense Mapping that was my career. When Mom got sick, that became my career.”
So what happened to this art of romance – this skill of love? When and how did romance become the codeword for porn and sex toys?
Believe it or not, we can all point to someone – a man named Kinsey. An evil man in Indiana turned love on its head and polluted the minds, hearts and souls of a generation of men who came home from World War II. Alfred Kinsey hired pedophiles to conduct research on sex in children. These evil men included a father that regularly molested his daughter, using a stop watch to carefully document data on his daughter’s reactions to his “romance”, and another monster, a Nazi pedophile who documented his experiments on children he raped in the death camp he lorded over. You can read David Kupelian’s book, Marketing of Evil to read all about Alfred Kinsey and his insanity. You can also refer to Worldnet Daily’s articles that detail Kinsey’s research data, tools, and “employees.” (http://www.wnd.com/2010/10/217565/; http://www.wnd.com/2010/10/213213/; http://www.wnd.com/2002/10/15690/; http://www.wnd.com/2010/10/216525/)
Today, Kinsey would be proud of the products of his “research”. Young people use sex as a way of thanking someone for a favor, or just to do something because it might be fun.
But in the midst of all this fun, fun, fun, comes great destruction – children are reared in the mindset that they are a bother and should be warehoused in front of a tv instead of read to and comforted, cuddled, and adored. Moms and dads don’t see why they need to get married, at least not until the bride gets rid of her baby bump. Guys have forgotten that they need to be the protector of their blood kin, and gals have forgotten that they deserve to be protected by their knight.
Yet, funny, children always come as a clean slate. They instinctively look for romance and love the way it is meant to be.
A few years ago, my daughter danced a solo. She danced to Taylor Swift’s song, mine. In this song, the girl laments how she was guarded because her parents did not stay together. Though she was in love with an honorable man, the first big fight lead to her running away in despair. Her love ran after her and said, “I will never leave you alone.” My daughter danced to this song as a ballerina. After the dance, two little girls who were in hip hop came to me and asked me if I was her mother. I told them yes. They gushed, “She was like a princess!”
You see, all is never lost. God placed in each of us the desire to look for the good, the valiant, the honorable, the true path to happiness.
There have always been deceitful evil snakes trying to lure us from light into the dark. But, the path back is always more simple than we think – turn on the light and head to it.
For those like me, generations lead down the wrong path – we must turn around and forge the right path for the younger ones.
Back to my dad and my mom and my visit. The last night that I was there we had to rush to the hospital. Dad and I thought it might be the end. My dad looked at my mom and stroked her face and kissed her and talked with the most soothing voice. “I know,” he said, “I know you have been through so much. I’m not going to leave you.”
The next morning my mom pulled through. God granted a miracle. The cancer cells were all dead ones. The doctors were stunned and pleased and told my dad that my mom should recover completely now.
That’s love, that’s romance.
Cathy Driscoll
pgdcldwram@verizon.net
Independent Examiner 