What is love?

Love is an implacable and endless war of extermination against
one’s selfishness. The antithesis, then, is the well-meaning, that which
the betrothed consider good for themselves. Because what my wife and I feel good about can be two different things. Praying every day for the gift of love is a sage thing to do. The relationship cannot survive independently; it needs to be nurtured by prayer every day. Constituent prayer, the French call it priers continually, in the tradition of the Eastern Fathers, coupled with the invocation of the name of Jesus, shelters love from storms and protects it from me, from my selfishness.
I don’t think man and woman are complementary. Instead, I think they walk hand in hand in their separate universes. Zoologist Robert Trivers looks at men and women as two fundamentally different biological species. We are different. Men think differently, and women feel, in their way, different from men. Both methods have their laws and their logic. That’s why, despite the books about Mars and Venus, sometimes men think they’re from Earth and that woman is from somewhere on Mars. But just because men don’t see the logic in women’s reasoning doesn’t mean that logic doesn’t exist: it means they don’t see it. It is remarkable how a man and woman are filled with goodwill and mutual love in their relationship and how they unwittingly inflict pain and unpleasant injuries on each other. It’s as if an alien astronaut had come to Earth, and we were very carefully trying to determine how to show our friendship. Or how, when an ethnographer tries to contact a new tribe in a hitherto undiscovered country. A bouquet of roses is a sign of love in a man’s world, but what does it mean in a girl’s world? Won’t a girl see a well-meaning joke as a declaration of war? Will she does not understand an offer of an escort home as a sovereign violation of her independence?

Her yes sometimes means yes, and other time’s no. Similarly, her no sometimes means no, and other times yes. Sometimes she says yes and no in a single sentence and means yes, and sometimes she means no. Sometimes both yes and no mean – of course, for all intents and purposes – yes and no. Sometimes yes and no compromise decide for yourself. Like in Chinese, the accent matters a lot and the circumstances. It has its logic. Sometimes a woman speaks in allusions that she considers transparent. Sometimes, as in military ciphers, the text means something other than what the word sequence implies, and inside the sentence, there is another sentence. Sometimes there is an anxious cry hidden in two calmly spoken announcement sentences, sometimes a plea and sometimes a message. As in folk songs, the melody is often a much more important statement than the text itself, which serves as the scaffolding of the piece. We men often remain in the first plane of words and fail to perceive the more critical second meaning hidden within. Women speak a different language, and it confuses men that their language in its various uses the same vocabulary and the same grammar. “You don’t understand me at all,” the women then point out, and the men have no that they remember precisely and everything, the woman said. Sometimes the mood changes without demonstrable cause, and similarly like a stricken airplane sinking and sinking until the final explosion in the sea. The men don’t understand and are surprised to learn from the girls that they don’t either.

Behaviorists regard man as a kind of black box: we know inputs and outputs, but we don’t know what’s going on inside. It is in this way
many times men think of women. How else is it possible that a girl, with all her calm courage, patient endurance of suffering, hard as steel, is simultaneously so vulnerable and delicate that a man feels he is holding in his arms the most fragile creature in the universe?
I find it ridiculous that marriage strategists with manuals, survival courses, and stupid slogans about love pass through the stomach. Whatever the saints were, they weren’t cynical and never had the humor of the kind. I don’t need a hot meal to live, don’t be angry, nor a regular diet, nor a life with a full pension, but I need to love and be loved, or I’ll die. A man struck by love is always in some way bowed out, as I ask many lovers when I ask them to pray incessantly for the beloved soul? A ceaseless prayer, priére continually, for the soul, which I have been entrusted to accompany, passes before waking up, as memory fills all the important and unimportant moments in the day, study and work, lessons and breaks, waiting for the bus and waiting in all the queues of the day; it is in the conversations and the creation and accompanies us at dusk and when we fall asleep. It continues in sleep. Invoking Jesus’ holy name is the simplest way of constant prayer. If an attentive heart humbly repeats it often, this invocation does not dissipate in “muchness” but preserves the word and bears fruit with perseverance.