'Love is love and not fade away' is the chorus and defining theme of Not Fade Away, a cover of the Buddy Holly track which was released by the Rolling Stones in 1964. This love song communicates the enduring nature of love while noting that authentic love must be reciprocated – 'Your love for me has got to be real / For you to know just how I feel'.
Mutual love is important. I often think of its classic expression in John Donne's poem The Good-Morrow, published in Songs and Sonnets (1633):
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
I am uneasy, however, with the dark rendition of the idea by Black Sabbath in N.I.B. released in 1970: 'Your love for me has just got to be real / Before you know the way I'm going to feel'. As the rest of the lyrics make clear, that kind of love is diabolical and no way mutual in the end.
Returning to Not Fade Away, this enduring love is idyllic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all loving relationships lasted for ever? In practice, many don't. One reason might be that love is unequal. Another, that circumstances change and its basis just disappears. It is not a good feeling when you realise that love has over-reached itself. The ending is heartbreak and emotional pain. How does anyone deal with that?
One way is the quiet killing of the desire that gave birth to love in the first place. The other person has just not got to matter any more. This last time this happened to me, I compiled a playlist of rejection songs that told of heartbreak and eventual recovery:
| Title | Artist |
|---|---|
| Washing of the Water | Peter Gabriel |
| Last Kiss | Taylor Swift |
| I Can't Make You Love Me | Bonnie Raitt |
| Run to You | Lea Michele |
| You Could Be Happy | Snow Patrol |
| Someone Like You | Adele |
| Let Her Go | Passenger |
| Pale Blue Eyes | The Velvet Underground |
| Space Cowboy | Kacey Musgraves |
| Somebody That I Used to Know | Gotye |
| Push the Sky Away | Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds |
| I Can See Clearly Now | Johnny Nash |
| I Don't Feel Noways Tired | Knut Reiersrud |
I find this helps, in the short term. But is it the right way to go? We lose something when we turn off the pain. Your heart can grow cold. There's a very well-known saying: 'It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all'. CS Lewis writes movingly of this in The Four Loves (1960), in a passage which is sometimes used in wedding services:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
A more positive approach is to stay with the love even after the loved one has gone. This is beautiful, from Stephen Cottrell in Praying Through Life (1998):
Prayer is love. The passion of Jesus shows us the depths and purpose of God’s love for us. This love is so hard to describe. It is echoed in all human loving, and when we experience the pain of bereavement we find out more about its mystery. For although we long for the pain to be healed, we would rather it stay, for if the pain went away so would the love. It is because we love so much that we hurt so much. I never fail to be moved by the writings of Julian of Norwich as she describes her visions of Jesus. She wonderfully affirms that the heart of the gospel is love: the love that is made possible through his passion and death.
I would like to believe that heartbreak can be transformative. What dies in the earlier love might be the selfishness that sees the relationship from its own point of view. A purer and stronger love may arise which is much more likely to endure.
I'm going to end with the lyrics from the song Dear Friends by Queen, on the album Sheer Heart Attack which was released in 1974. I think it speaks of love succeeding love in different relationships but maybe it also means love perfecting love in the same relationship.
So dear friends your love is gone
Only tears to dwell upon
I dare not say as the wind must blow
So a love is lost, a love is won
Go to sleep and dream again
Soon your hopes will rise and then
From all this gloom life can start anew
And there'll be no crying soon.