Love

Love each day as if it's your last, one day you'll be right quoth Woody Allen. 

‘Do you love me? ‘The spoon, loaded with cereal and fruit, pauses before the lips. The right answer will evoke a knowing smile. The wrong one, or a hesitation, will return the spoon to the bowl. Breakfast will be over.

No one would be surprised if you confessed to never having hated, but anyone professing to be unfamiliar with love, as giver or recipient, would be regarded as eccentric or perverse. Yet do we understand what it means? English is celebrated for its richness. If a word doesn't deliver the precise nuance, there are half a dozen not-quite synonyms to choose from. More awkward is when the same word carries multiple meanings. When they are quite distinct, confusion is rare. No one would construe ‘I have a beef with you’ as confirmation of joint ownership of a cow. But when the meanings overlap, that is the territory of miscommunication. My son says he loves pizza. That doesn't mean he is attracted to it as a sexual partner nor that wants to spend the rest of his life eating nothing but pizza (although occasionally I wonder).  In this case, ‘love’ is simply an intensifier, meaning ‘like a lot’. 

Parents love their children which is a shorthand for saying that they would sacrifice many other things in life, sometimes life itself, to protect them. Children love their parents, often caveating that this does not necessarily mean they like them. It means they have a sense of gratitude, often manifested through dutiful care.

The state of being ‘in love’ is well-documented. Intense physical attraction combined with infatuation producing obsessional and irrational behavior when decision-making is impaired or impulsive.

‘Do you love me?’ That breakfast table question, triggered by some imagined slight, momentary inattention or lapse of propriety, probes the partner for a different message. It's easy enough to say yes, but when I say I love her, do I mean the same as when she reciprocates? Am I attracted to her physically? Certainly. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Yes – well, at the moment. Would I stand between her and a grizzly bear? Unlikely. Unpacking the component parts of ‘love’ and holding them up to the light to see if they match our feelings is unlikely to get us on to the scrambled eggs.

Look, we've come this far, we rub along pretty well together, neither of us irritates the other excessively, we often have fun and it's too much effort and too high risk to look for perfection, so yes, I do love you. Or, as David Sidaris confessed, he planned to stay with his partner for the rest of his life as he couldn't bear the idea of going to another gay bar.

Loss

The inflection points at which the number of wedding invitations decreases and the number of funeral invitations increases coincide. At this point, more attention is paid to friends. Like physical fitness, friendship is slow to attain but decays rapidly if neglected. Even the slender thread of an annual Christmas card can pull through the sturdier rope of reignited friendship in propitious circumstances. 

With no digital backup, in the past even the loss of a tattered address book, edge etched with letters of the alphabet for easy reference, could sever a friendship. Work contacts, their status determined by context and poised uncertainly between acquaintanceship and friendship, wither through indifference or relocation. Mass slaughter of entire networks is the byproduct of divorce, when jointly held friends express their allegiance or self-righteousness by taking sides. Long after the wrangling over money and children has been settled, it is the loss of friends which leaves enduring bruises. 

In old age, as the count of friends dwindles from natural causes, the remaining stock becomes more valuable, if only because of scarcity. It also triggers the realisation that the longevity of a friendship has inherent value. As the saying goes, you can’t make new old friends. The grumpy old buffer, tetchy through ill-health, frustration and disappointment, nevertheless shares a hinterland of experiences, joyful or horrific, which form part of both parties’ personal history and identity. 

So the deliberate termination of a four-decade long friendship, must be a decision taken only as a result of the gravest offence. And nevertheless, of this action, three people will suffer. Two at least have their grievance to comfort them, I am left with perplexity.