I remember it well - it was the Sunday before my nineteenth birthday when suddenly a quiet friendship burst into romance. If the movies had it their way that would be love. Just this week, I saw the video of the movie Notting Hill, with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, a movie full of the life changing improbability of love. But in spite of the movies, in spite of TV that is not all there is to love. Love is not just a flash in the pan.
Love is also about the enduring friendships, the steady, constant love of a lifetime.
Sometimes, ideally, this is the love which marriages are made of, love which may have begun with the romance of the movies but which has grown and matured. It's the love that comes with knowing someone through and through. And then there is the love we have for our children, that inexplicable sense which fills us when we first see that wrinkled, crying, and, to be honest, ugly little creature which is the wonder of a new born baby. That love which makes us get up night after night to their crying, which sees us through the traumas of teenage years, and can grow to something more like friendship as our children reach adulthood. And there is the love of our animals, the wagging tail and enthusiastic licking which our dogs greet us with when we arrive home as if we had been gone a month rather than just out doing the shopping, and the deep throated purr of a contented cat, the love that tears us apart when they die.