Love is Like a Greased Pig
By Mark Gungor
“I just don’t feel what I used to feel for you.”
“I love you, but I’m not in love with you anymore.”
“I believe I’ve found my soul mate…and it isn’t you.”
Or as the Righteous Brothers sang, “You’ve lost that loving feeling.”
However people want to word it, the bottom line is this: The fabulous and intense experience of our early love isn’t there anymore. I guess it wasn’t true love after all.
In the wonderful movie classic, The Princess Bride, the cotton-mouthed, speech-challenged priest talks about “true love” (Or “twuuuu wuv” as he says it!) at the wedding ceremony of Princess Buttercup and Prince Humperdink. He states that true love will follow you forever. While it makes for a great movie line, in reality it is a bunch of nonsense. True love doesn’t follow you like a little puppy that is constantly there. It’s actually more like a greased pig! You have to chase after it and pursue it. You have to run it down and tackle it and when it gets away, you go after it one more time. You may finally get a hold of it for a while, but then the little rascal can slip away and you have to chase it down again.
I know, I know—a greased pig isn’t all that romantic of an analogy to use, but it surely is more realistic and more accurate! Men and women who ascribe to all this romantic fantasy stuff will be sorely disappointed. So many people actually think that love and marriage will always be easy; that it will always be a skip through the meadow with birds chirping and butterflies flitting and the orchestra playing in the background. They think that the emotional high and buzz they experience at the beginning of dating or marriage will always be there. “Our love is true love and it will never fade!” That’s why so many people become disillusioned once they get into marriage—and sometimes it doesn’t take very long at all. They think that they have “fallen out of love” with their spouse once the flames of passion begin to die down to a smoldering ember.
Of course, our feelings change over time. There is no way that the initial euphoria can go on and on. It gives way to a deeper and more mature kind of love. The stages of marriage have been well documented in the research. That initial high that people experience at the onset usually only lasts six months to two years. Once the buzz is gone, the mistake that people often make is to allow their “feelings” to dictate their actions. They don’t feel that rush of emotion that they associated with love in the beginning and therefore, they assume they aren’t in love any more. Then naturally, since they don’t feel love, they reason (wrongly) that they must be true to their feelings. As a result, many Read the rest of this entry »
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