Hard Love

Happy Single Awareness Day! Oh, SAD! I get it now! Sorry, my sister told me this alternate name. I didn't get it until I typed it out. Haha... not very funny. Moving on...

I was watching the March of the Penguins the other day. There wasn't anything else to rent, and I heard some good things about the movie. However, looking at the box, it didn't look appealing. For one thing, no breasts were anywhere in sight. Second, no guns, either. Third, I saw the logo of National Geographic on there. Undeterred by these discouraging signs, I paid my pieces of silver (ok, a credit card) and took it home. Popping it in, I was greeted with snow. No, not the TV snow that I had at one Super Bowl party which forced all my friends to watch in my mom's bedroom, but real snow, with glaciers and stuff. They were doing it for like 5 minutes, while Morgan Freeman's cool bass voice droned about the beginning of life and the Ice age.

Then the first penguin appeared, and I was enthralled. What followed was the annual pilgrimmage of the noble Emperor Penguin and the quest to get laid (literally!). One interesting fact was that the penguin is semi-monogamous. For one year, they are faithful to one spouse, but the next year all bets are off. And in a wonderful twist, the females fight over the males because typically there are less males than females. The movie tells you later on why that is. Despite the fact I still dozed off in several places, I still heartily recommend this movie.

However, what I learned about the struggle of the penguins didn't hit me until this past week, while doing the series on love and jealousy. And I will be giving you, lucky readers, my well-thought revelation. Love makes you do stupid things. No, I'm just teasing, sorta. Love is hard work, that's what I was trying to say. The male penguins have to walk around with an egg under their butt for 3 months. Not only did they get teased by the other male birds for doing a woman's job, they had to endure snow storms, freezing nights, and hunger. Watching all these proud males huddle together for warmth just to survive was one of the most endearing things I saw. And why did they do that? Because it was a great male bonding thing? No, it was for the love of an unborn child.

Love is such a powerful emotion. It can turn the smartest person in the planet into an idiot. It humbles the most reserved man into making the biggest fool of himself. Likewise, it can make two selfish and self-serving individuals give up their money, comfort and even happiness for someone else. In fact, it can cost up to $863,686 to raise a child and send it off to college. Back when I went to college, my dad was very fond of saying that he could have bought a new car for every year I was in the university. My mother gave up a nice job to take care of me and later my sister back before we were able to go to school. I'm sure you can think of the many sacrifices your parents had to give up just because they loved you. If not, at the very least, your mother had to endure one of the most painful moments in her life, your teenage years... err childbirth, of course.

I've talked about first love previously. However, that's actually a shallow, superficial type of love. If you find out before marriage that you two are incompatible, you can break up, and find someone else. It may hurt for a while, but it probably won't scar you for life. But once you're married, you're stuck (at least in the Christian sense). And that's when love becomes hard work, but nevertheless is a deeper sense of love. Now, there's no way out, you are one body as the Bible says. You snores, she steal your sheets. He likes to squeeze the toothpaste from the middle, you like to roll it up. Seat up or seat down? Soon, every little nagging thing that you've ignored up to now will very soon rub you raw. But you learn to deal with it. You learn to put up with the flaws, because that is what love is. Love is learning to live for someone else. It seems like a very difficult task, but hey, you gotta be glad you're not out in the snow, sitting on an egg while huddling with other strange men just to keep warm, right?