An Atlantic User Comment Shatters My Conception of Love and What It Means to Love

Erik Vanderhoff has completely reversed the paradigm that is internet user comments in one fell swoop, having written what I consider with no exaggeration or melodrama to be one of the most beautiful bits of prose I've read in a long while. Responding to an article about marriage, he overshadows the genius that is Ta-Nehisi Coates with the following words:

I met my wife when I was 23 (she was 26), and somehow managed to convince her to accompany me on a date three months before my 24th birthday. We were engaged by the time I was 26, married when I was 27. Every important step, save perhaps one, of my journey in to manhood has been at her side.

I had not dated a lot by age 23, but I had had some formative experiences: The one you pursued and who pursued you, but then you realized you were wrong for each other. The one you desperately wanted to adore you back and did not. The one you made your first bumbling steps into lust and passion with. The one you were with because you were lonely. The one you were with because you were horny and selfish and, twelve years later, regret deceiving. And, most importantly, the one you thought you were going to marry because you could not imagine loving anyone more than her.

First loving my wife was all of those emotions and lusts and passions made physical and manifested with an intensity that burned my sanity to the ground. Every single youthful conception of love was rendered into ash by her reality. I knew it with amazing clarity at my young age, one of the few moments of cosmic lucidity I have ever experienced, mirrored only by the utter poleaxe to my soul that came with first sight of my children.

To a reasonable extent, I have no issues publicly sharing my limited and sometimes painful experiences in love. We all have them, there's no reason my story can't be your's, as well. That's what we as people universally do: Share our experiences in the hopes that some are mirrored in others, because at times nothing is more comforting than a commonality that lets you know how normal you are in simply being human.

I thought I knew what love is; I still do, just through the lens that is my personal experience and my perceptions of friends and family who realize love through one another. My idea of love, however, and my badge of that love leaving me, were mocked mercifully by Mr. Vanderhoff and his ability to write about a feeling I can't imagine elucidating, even if I had felt it.

I know those stages of experience - to date out of boredom, loneliness, convenience, or simply as something to do because it's different from what you've been doing. I've had my knees buckle at the realization of  love for another, and I've felt the crush of the weight of the world on my shoulders when that love up and left.

But to have my "every single youthful conception of love rendered into ash by her reality"? It's hard to reflect on your past emotions to find something that compares to those words. Have I felt that? Perhaps the answer lies in simply asking the question. Or maybe it's just the first time I've seen the concept of love manifest so simply and wonderfully into words.

What is love for me now? Love is seeing my family and friends in 13 days. Love is soaking in the rest of these experiences in a foreign country that has become home. Love is this song. These things I can understand, fumble into coherent thoughts, analyze into some form of context or greater meaning. Mr. Vanderhoff's reality of love? I'm looking forward to feeling an emotion so dense in its own greatness that you can't fathom it without experiencing it firsthand.

That feeling that can't be reckoned with until you've lived it is one that I think is summed well in the notion that you shouldn't waste your time, or the time of another, if you answer 'yes' to the following question: Could you live without them? I'm not sure what I would have answered if given that question a few years ago. It  wouldn't have been something I would have wanted to consider.

When I wasn't given the choice anymore, when it was made for me without my consent, I spent a lot of time wondering 'what next'? I spent a lot of time on the bottle, feeling sorry for myself. But I lived; I've lived more in the time since that love left than I ever did when I had it. There was no other choice, and there won't be a different one until my conceptions are turned into ash by the presence of another.