What Love Really Means

"Why do people have to love people anyway?" - Shirley MacLaine. This quote is from a film that Billy Wilder wrote and directed and stared Shirley MacLaine titled The Apartment. The line was originally spoken by Shirley during rehearsal when she lamented to her co-workers about a love gone wrong. Wilder loved that insight so much he asked Shirley to say it in the movie. This question I find a staggering one to answer. Why do we need to love? I personally think its one of the very things we need to live. We need to eat, to move, to laugh, to yell, to cry, and to love in order to survive. Love is the reminder that to ourselves that we matter in this world. We need to love ourselves so we don't forget that and we need to love others so that they don't forget it. Why I am so focused on this topic of what love really means? Well in America today one of the biggest debates comes from this very topic. Marriage equality is one of the most hot-button issues and we all know it will come up in the course of the 2012 election. I am not here to talk politics nor take sides on the political spectrum, but I get very offended when we as Americans claim that this is a free country and yet its a debate on whether or not someone can get married. How is that free? I get even more offended when the opposition to marriage comes from many of my fellow Christians whom claim it is against God's will or God's plan to allow marriage equality. God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, they say. I love my fellow Christians but I simply just don't agree. First off, we can never know God's plan or what God has in store for any of our lives so how can we claim to know what is or isn't against God's plan? And second, am I the only one who read the story of Adam and Eve? Within that story God creates what appears to be the perfect set up; Adam is a man, Eve is a woman, they love each other, they live in a world of access and need nothing, life is perfect until (insert plot twist here) they discover they have... FREE WILL! And because of free will the screw up making God realize that imperfect beings can not live in a perfect setting and casts them out into a imperfect world. Adam and Eve were not the model of perfection because they proved they weren't perfect. This story proves that perfection can not and will not ever exist for humans. So why do we still fight for it? Why do Christians hold themselves to this unattainable level of perfection only to set themselves up to fail? Why? Because we are afraid of appearing not good enough. So many gay Christians will never come out of the closet for fear of not appearing good enough. What we are forgetting is that God's love transcends all that. We don't need to appear good enough because we are good enough and it doesn't matter who you love because all love is Good. To quote Les Miserables, "To love another person is to see the face of God." As long as we love we are doing God's work, and if that is a person of the same gender that we love, God knows that love is real. And that brings me to my final point; why do people put so much emphasis on loving a member of the same gender? "It has to be a man loving a woman and vice versa to be a meaningful relationship." Note that this is the only relationship where the love is required to be of a specific gender. A father is not required to love his daughter and not his son, and a mother is not required to love her son and not her daughter. If someone said that the gender of either yourself or your child dictated whether you could love and care for them it would be considered hateful and laughable. Even in most social circles gender is not usually a deciding factor of whether or not two people can be close friends. So why does this prejudice only exist amongst spouses? Perhaps its the fact that only a man and woman couple can procreate independently. But even in that case a couple could still be unable to conceive and need to adopt or get a surrogate. They could even just adopt cause they wanted to. But not all straight couples have children, neither do all gay couples want children. But then when they do, the argument comes up that its not beneficial for a child to not have a mother and father and two moms or two dads simply wont do. Really??? How about the mother who's husband died and never remarried? Her daughter is now married, has two kids, has a career, two masters degrees and is happy mind, body and soul. How about the man who's wife ran out on him leaving him with eight year old? That eight year old is now eighteen and just got into Julliard as a concert pianist. These were cases were a child didn't have both roles filled in their life and one person had the strength to fill both shoes. Isn't it fair to assume that if two people are raising a child, even if they aren't both genders, that they will be able to do what all parents do and make it work? When you truly love someone, be it friend, spouse or child, it is not the gender or the supposed role that needs to be filled that matters. What matters is the love you feel and how it drives you to do what you can to give that other person a better life. All you need is to love the other person and everything else will work out the way it needs to. So forget gender, forget prejudice, and forget preconceived gender roles and learn what love really means.