MEADOR: Society lacks true intimacy, romance

New York Times editor Dana Jennings knows a thing or two about love.

But it's not the sort of knowledge you'll find in Hallmark Cards or neatly summed up bumper-sticker wisdom.

Jennings was diagnosed with prostate cancer 10 months ago. Since then, it's been one battle after another, as he describes in a recent column, "Right now, I'm not quite what you'd call ‘a catch.' I wear man-pads for intermittent incontinence, I'm a bazaar of scars, and haven't had a full erection in seven months. Most nights, I'm in bed by 10. The Lupron hormone shots, which suppress the testosterone that can fuel prostate cancer, have sent my sex drive lower than the stock market, shrunken my testicles, and given me hot flashes so fierce that I sweat outdoors when it's 20 degrees and snowing."

Yet, his wife Deb continues to stay with him, caring for him and his many needs as he suffers through cancer.

Stories like the Jennings' simultaneously call for delight and despair - delight for the beautiful way their love continues in the midst of cancer - and despair for their story's tragedy.

But perhaps most tragic of all is the rarity of stories like theirs in our culture.

How many times do we read paragraphs like, "Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can't compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital"?

We're a culture in love with the mountain tops, and we're populated by aspiring mountain dwellers. We look with envy at the rich and successful, not realizing that many are likely miserable, precisely because of their wealth and affluence.

We love the extravagantly perfect: the romantic comedy climax, the ending where everybody lives happily ever after.

It's not wrong to aspire to such things. But it is wrong to look for discounted ways of getting them that cost us nothing emotionally, physically, socially or spiritually. And that is why stories like the Jennings' are so important.

We believe that we can get to the mountain top through success, through academic prestige, through affluence.

We've forgotten the necessity of valleys. We still go through them, but we've forgotten their function as a means of introducing us to our own damaged natures.

These metaphorical valleys take many shapes, but they affect us all - it might be depression, it might be financial, it might be - as in the case of the Jennings - physical. But if we fail to see their necessity, we'll be destroyed by them.

For many of us, the valley is loneliness. According to a study by Duke sociologists, a quarter of Americans do not have a single confidant and half have only one. Suicide.org reports that the 2003 suicide rate for 20-to-24-year-olds was twice what it was in 1950. More generally, who amongst us can't relate to the feeling of simply not having time for people and the consequential isolation that comes from it?

Psychologist Margaret Gibbs of Fairleigh Dickinson University perhaps sums up the problem most succinctly, saying, "People are increasingly busy. We've become a society where we expect things instantly and don't spend the time it takes to have real intimacy with another person."

But rather than turning to our neighbor in humility and asking if we could work through these valleys together, we try to numb ourselves to the pain that surrounds us.

We've turned to medication, which though often helpful, can't solve everything (powerfully demonstrated in Zach Braff's marvelous "Garden State"). We've turned to reality TV as a method of emotional catharsis to compensate for the authentic relationships so many of us lack. Others among us find our way to social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. Yet rather than helping us make sense of difficult times, they anesthetize us to them. These reactions drive our souls further in on themselves, until eventually they cave in.

Counselor John Powell describes the potential problems of social networking by saying, "All the students I work with have incredibly many pseudo-intimate relationships online — but without the kind of risk and vulnerability that goes with sitting across a cafe booth from another person."

The Jennings tell us about an alternative. Perhaps especially timely only two days after Valentine's Day, their story is of romance cultivated through valleys, "earthy" love that transcends the difficulties of life. It isn't the sort of romance captured in Hallmark truisms or bumper sticker maxims. It's bigger than that.

Dana sums it up by saying, "Given a choice between the mere biology of lust and the deep soul of love, I'll take love."

Jake Meador is a junior history and english major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.