Groucho Love

Second in a shamelessly honest series on Love.


So what is worse than being told “I don’t love you and I never will?” Perhaps knowing you should say it to someone else.

A zillion years ago I sat on a couch looking out a window onto a perfect, crystal clear lake below with sincere tears on my cheeks. The tears were misinterpreted as oh-I-love-you-so-much tears. Actually, they were, dang-this-ain’t-it tears. I mean, I loved him enough to cry about not loving him enough. I think of this as Groucho love.

I’ve had conversations long into the night about when a person knows she’s truly in love or when a person realizes he isn’t in love anymore. I’ve had many of them, actually, and I still don’t really have a clue what makes it so other than timing.

Carl Rogers would probably say you just have to create the right conditions and put yourself out there and it will happen. Glasser would say you simply choose to love someone. Freud would say. . . well, he’d probably mumble something about cigars, I’m not sure. My point is, knowing what the famous shrinks say about love doesn’t actually help all that much.

However, that great philosopher, Groucho Marx put it succinctly when he said, “I’d never want to belong to an organization that would have me as a member.” Anyone who would love me is unlovable. Strange belief, isn’t it? Yet it’s a pretty common one.

Sometimes we just get love confused with the chase. Once a person is caught, the chase is over. It’s confusing love with infatuation, I think. Don’t get me wrong, Children, infatuation is mmm, mmm, good and the chase is exercise. Maybe it’s the sort of exercise that’s training for the real thing.

Or maybe it’s just a way for me feel so good and noble and important through pure fertilizer. “Oh, it just killed me to have to break his heart, blah, blah, sniff, sniff.”

If there is such a thing as a real thing, it surely isn’t Groucho love. It’s a journey, not a destination.