I Love You...For Now

The subject of unconditional love has been coming up repeatedly for me lately. I went to see (500) Days of Summer at the McClurg Theater downtown -- a fabulous venue by any standard, yet something about its cavernous interior always gives me a surreal sense of isolation, even when the seats are packed. Or maybe the surreal sense comes from the time I was there for the debut showing of Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp and filmed in Chicago, and all the extras were there too, dressed in period clothing, which made for that time warp feeling. Or maybe it's that, earlier, I'd actually seen Johnny Depp on the red carpet and the place will be forever lonely without him. Talk about unconditional love...

But I digress. In (500) Days of Summer I loved the part where the main character Tom, in the throes of lovesickness, says to Zooey Deschanel's character Summer something like "I want to know that you're not going to feel differently about me tomorrow." And she looks at him with those big doe-eyes and says, "I can't give you that. No one can."

It reminded me of the lyrics to a Split Endz song: "You know that I love you, here and now, not forever. I can give you the present. I don't know 'bout the future. That's all stuff and nonsense."

Harsh, I thought. But true?

Unwillingly, I re-lived my first heartbreak, when my college boyfriend turned to me one night and said "I don't love you anymore." In my twenties I believed love was something you couldn't turn off. It was like a magical spigot, once turned on it would be stuck on, pouring love like water into eager upturned hands. Twenty years later, I've seen a few faucets dry up. Sometimes in little drips, other times like a sledge hammer coming down on an old fixture. When my husband told me he'd been cheating on and off for ten years, and had just spent 12 hours with someone in Las Vegas who was destined to be his new love, it was a crash course in the changeable nature of love.

Now I find myself wondering if the only love that can't really be destroyed is the love we have for our children, or our parents. Those primordial relationships are in our very DNA. We'll stretch the ties to near breaking, but only because we're confident there's some high-quality elastic there. With anyone else you can spend years learning each other and one day be handed a big red-letter F, flunking an exam you didn't know you were taking. There's my cynic.

But then I'll moments of such expansive, joyous love toward someone and it does makes sense. Time truly seems to stand still. In that kind of love there's no future because there's no room for it. Constructs like tomorrow, next week, next year only cage it in. There's still a learning curve, yes, but no striving, no grade.

I wonder if the next time someone says "I'm just over you," I'll be able to remain philosophical. And I can't decide if knowing it can happen at any time makes love more precious. Or just makes me sad.