by Jims Vincent Capuno
In the past, all “once upon a time” stories hade “and they lived happily ever after” endings. But reality bites. Love, like life, is “a bed of roses.” Some marriages maybe “made in heaven,” but people forget that there are also storms and lightnings in heaven.
Love is inscrutable. While it brings happiness to most people, it also produces too many sufferings. Last year, the February issue of the Asian edition of Reader’s Digest tried to delve into the strange, and often painful, world of love. “But let’s face it, not everybody’s happy in love,” wrote author Chelsia Toon.
“Till death do us part…” This is what married couples say when they tie the nuptial not. Most deaths are a tragedy. But it is more tragic if the person you love most is the one who takes your life away. Such is what happened to a Filipino couple.
“A Filipino fishmonger found out his wife was going to divorce him because of his suspected love affair,” Toon reported. “The 35-year-old, who was a refugee in Malaysia, used illegal fishing explosives to blow up his wife and himself at his sister-in-law’s house in Kota Kinabalu.”
Of course, you definitely remember the case of Lorena and John Bobbitt. In 1933, the wife lopped off her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife. Toon recalled the incident: “The long-abused wife was allegedly raped after John returned home drunk. After the severing, she drove around the neighborhood before flinging the dismembered paret out the car window. The police found the severed penis, which was reattached to John after a nine-hour surgery.”
Angelina Jolie is known as the current wife of heartthrob Brad Pitt. But not too many know that she was formerly married to another actor, Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton. For years, the couple “wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks while they were married.”
In an interview by press last year, Jolie clarified: “It was never a vial anyway. It was like a flower press. It was like from a slight cut on your finger and you press your fingerprint in. I thought it was romantic.”
It was romantic – until they got divorced. “Ah, yes, divorce…from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet,” Hollywood actor Robin Williams once said. To women, divorce means money from the man they professed to love “forever.”
But how much can a divorce cost? Rupert Murdoch had to pay his wife of 32 years, Anna Murdoch, a whooping US$1.7 billion (including US$110 million in cash). This was in 1998. Four years later, Sumner Redstone gave his wife of 55 years, Phyllis Gloria Raphael, US$1.48 billion to end their marriage. About US$874 million was what Soraya Khashoggi received from her ex-husband Adnan Khashoggi when their 21-year affair-plagued marriage came to an abrupt ending.
So much for “love gone wrong”!
As we celebrate the month of lovers, one question that comes to mind is: “What is love?” First Corinthians 13:1-8 has this answer, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love I gain nothing.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away…”
The 13th verse says it all: “And now these things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Virgil, in Ecologues, X, wrote: “Omnia vincit Amor; et nos cedamus Amori.” (“Love conquers all; let us too yield to Love.”)
Consider this. He was one of the most sought-after bachelors in Europe . Then, at a house party, he met Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American who was married to her second husband, a London shipping broker. As fate would have it, he was smitten by her. He asked whether she missed American central heating. She replied, “I’m sorry, sir, but you disappoint me… Every American woman who comes to your country is always asked the same question. I had hoped for something more original from the Prince of Wales.”
In January 1936, when King George V died, his son – the Prince of Wales – became the king. He was known as King Edward VIII. Before long, rumors circulated about his alleged romance with Mrs. Simpson. On October 20, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin counseled Edward, as king and head of the Church of England, to remove all cause for the rumors. A week later Mrs. Simpson was granted a divorce, to become final in six months.
In November, King Edward confided to Baldwin that he intended to marry Mrs. Simpson even if it meant his abdication. A morganatic marriage was proposed, but the cabinet was unwilling to accept this compromise. “But you must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love!” Edward was quoted as saying.
On December 11, 1936, therefore, the king abdicated in favor of his brother, the Duke of York, who became King George VI. Edward received the title Duke of Windsor and married Mrs. Simpson in June 1937. And they lived happily ever after!
Ah, love!
