As I cradle my four-month-old and marvel at him smiling back at me, his eyes big as harvest moons, his legs pinwheeling in excitement, I realize something about love.
We learn it.
Love is not a given of nature. It is not a sense like pain. We aren't endowed with a certain supply of it through genetics like height or eye color. It's not a gift of the magi, nor does it arrive from Cupid's arrow. Before a baby learns to speak, to roll, to hold aloft its head, it learns what it is to be loved and how to love in return; A smile begets a smile, a coo begets a coo.
On the third child for my wife and me, the process of love shouldn't seem such a revelation. But as I coax a smile to bloom across my baby's face, like tossing a pebble in a pond and watching the circles grow, I realize that the making of love -- not love-making -- gets far too little emphasis in our world.
There's plenty of debate on the make-up of sex-ed. Who educates parents about what love means? Presumably their own parents, although how does that cycle get bridged if it gets broken? Sacrifice, devotion, attentiveness, but not possessiveness -- all seem worthy components in love, but there's no hard checklist. Love is so overused a term as to seem trite, and so intangible to be taken for granted. And yet so many problems today seem anchored in a dry dock devoid of affection.
Why does the urban poverty of the '90s seem so intractable next to the impoverishment of generations past? A breakdown of love. That was the fiber that saw families through depressions and world wars. The need for love was no more talked about then, but people seemed to respect its power.
Educators say they're saddled with more behaviorial problems than ever in rich and poor communities alike. Why? A lack of discipline, which in its most effective form, is an obligation of love.
Our political debate is increasingly a scorched earth barren of love -- or at least civility, which is a byproduct of one's ability to love others and oneself. What could be less loving than the judgmental debate over "family values?" And, all the while, the mass media glorify lifestyles of the rich and famous, most of whom are paupers and nobodies when it comes to making and maintaining relationships.
If the wide eyes of an infant don't shed enough light on love's essentialness, senior citizens taking stock of the journey of their lives might.
The Charlestown Retirement Community in Baltimore County polled its residents on what they wanted for Christmas. The surveyors said they had no preconceived notions about the answers. Nearly half the respondents eschewed the normal goodies one might have expected on their lists and instead requested the love and attention of their children and grandchildren.
"In the baby-boomer years, we're busy, busy, busy, but we lose sight of what's important," says Dr. Robert Bingham, a family counselor at the complex. "Seniors come to know better what's important. They won't talk about their jobs, even though many of them had successful careers. You'll have 80-year-olds talking about things they remember doing with their own parents."
There's even a field of study to measure the medicinal benefits of love, in one sense at least. At the University of Miami Medical School's Touch Research Institute, physicians have found that premature babies grow faster if they're massaged a little every day. Moreover, when senior-citizen volunteers were brought in to do the infant massages, the seniors' own health and stress hormone levels improved. Conversely, we've all seen reports of the orphans neglected in Romania who failed to thrive, or of other warehoused infants who stopped making sounds after getting accustomed to their cries going unanswered.
Whether you believe all you need is love, as the Beatles sang, may depend on how much else you have. You can fall into both love and money, but that's where the similarity ends. For some, born with a silver spoon or the Midas touch, money comes easy. But regardless of life's station, you have to work at love. Even if you're born royal you can make a mess of it.
If this sounds frivolous, love is anything but: It is central to our being. Peer into the wide eyes of a newborn or listen to seniors making Christmas wishes. Unfettered by the trappings that consume the vast middle of our lives, they know that love is the first gift we desire and the last one we will crave.
Andrew Ratner is director of zoned editorials for The Baltimore Sun.