"The Love Issue" Insights

The NY Times Magazine recently had its "Love" issue. Their definition of "love" can be a little, er, um, atypical at times, but they still had some insights I thought were interesting. 

From the Instagram account "subway hands" by Hannah La Follette Ryan

In a profile on divorce lawyer: 

According to Tom Kretchmar, a Manhattan divorce lawyer with Chemtob, Moss, Forman & Beyda, most people enter marriages fully aware of certain nagging problems — like, say, a bad temper — but choose to overlook them. “They think, how bad is it really to get yelled at because you didn’t put the toothbrush back where it belongs?” he said. “But then over five, 10, 20 years or even just six months, it’s like, ‘How much more of this can I take?’ Forget cheating or the business failing. Often, it’s just like, ‘You’re not a very good person.’”

"My view on love is this: You may not know if it's right, but you do know if it's wrong."—Abigail Greystoke, elementary school director

Regarding the many couples riding the Staten Island Ferry: 

There were people who liked that the other didn’t talk too much. People who liked that they were very similar. People who liked that they were different. People who liked how the other kept showing up every day in life, no matter what. People who stayed after bearing witness to long-past bad behavior. They were all people who had made it through the wilderness of singledom and found someone with whom they could just sit on the ferry.

Sure, there were a few more cinematic moments. Tim and Michelle, a Mennonite couple from Indiana on a missionary trip with their youth group, kissed while the kids around them “oooohed” the way kids do. But for the most part, the sentiments most often expressed were of comfort, of dependability, of a feeling the partner inspired. There weren’t sweeping stories of romance and passion. Their stories were fairly mundane. They had settled in for the long haul.

Maybe that’s the goal. Maybe that’s the nature of good and enduring love, that eventually it’s not something you think about. Maybe our wish shouldn’t be for epic gestures of romance but for our relationships to become a little bit like the ferry itself: round the clock, free and always on time. How nice would that be? To have someone to sit with for all the long commutes.