Are We Falling Out Of Love With Love?
Love, he says.
Only because he’s Al Green, he doesn’t just leave it at that. He slides his voice up and down the word, rubbing himself against it like a sacred talisman, building tension that bursts in the stratosphere of falsetto, the word finally stretched to fit sex and sacrament and eternity side by side. Somebody counts off the time, the guitar slides up from a primordial ooze of organ riffs and the sermon is under way.
Love and Happiness.
Ah, they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. In the ‘90s, singers think love is only a promise to “freak you” all night in sweat-stained sheets.
Do you remember Love?
Nothing against sex, mind you - female fans threw their undies at Rev. Al, too. But do you remember schoolboy crushes and schoolgirl swoons, constricted throats and stammered words? Do you remember slow going and finding your way and feeling yourself falling and it was like dawn breaking inside your chest?
I don’t mean to suggest that love has died. Certainly, the Hollywood fantasy factory seems to be cranking out as many love stories as ever. I still see kids sharing secret looks and guilty giggles. And you can even find a love song or two on the video channel if you listen past the “do me” tunes.
But do you get the sense, as I do sometimes, that love is on its sickbed? That young people don’t believe in it the way their parents did? That they nod and smile when you mention it, but that the meaning of it doesn’t really reach them in their souls?
Man, once upon a day, we thought love could make you strong enough to jump the World Trade Center. Thought it was sweet enough to make sugar hide its face. We transcribed the wisdom of poets like Smokey Robinson and Lionel Richie, thought the secrets of the ages lay between the lines of their songs. I remember looking into the eyes of girls whose names I can’t even remember now, and seeing - I swear - a universe of meaning swirling there.
Maybe we were in love with love. Maybe we had too much faith in forever. Maybe we were just crazy.
Whatever it was, I can sense it dying in these raw and impatient times. I find myself repeating Diana Ross’ plaintive question: “Where did our love go?”
Not inner city Chicago, says New Yorker magazine. There, 60 percent of black adults between the ages of 18 and 44 have never been married, and one woman says the idea of staying with a single man for life is a “fantasy.” She says, “I’ve never met many people like that, have you?”
And it’s not just a black thing. In March, the Census Bureau reported that for probably the first time in history, the majority of Americans in their 20s have never been married.
Did our children learn to distrust love because divorce rates skyrocketed? Because “for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health” was rendered a joke by marriages that ruptured the first time someone left the cap off the toothpaste?
Or maybe it was the unforgiving tenor of our times that did it, the fact that we have exchanged old illusions for new uncertainty. And how can uncertainty make promises to eternity?
Of course, we’ve always lived with uncertainty, and love has always flowered regardless. But the uncertainty is inside these days, isn’t it? And that makes all the difference.
Recently, I approached my oldest child, who will be 22 in a matter of days. Is it just me, I asked, or have people his age lost faith in love? He replied that his generation just doesn’t believe in it like mine did. They don’t feel any pressure to get caught up in “all that.”
That’s what he called it, and it stopped me. The thing that made you strong enough to jump the World Trade Center is “all that?” Have mercy.
The young man who bags my groceries was talking to a couple in line the other day. They had been married 27 years and that was so amazing to him that his mouth hung open. So amazing that he tapped the checker at the next register so he, too, could see this oddity.
Maybe we should all look while we still can.
xxxx