When two people care, and they just take their time...love can be a whole lot more than magic

Getting from Too to Two takes Time
all-purpose, practical advice on Love, Friendship, and Time

By Gretchen Louise Glaser, 2004

“I can’t wait to go to prom with him in a couple of years!” gushed my little friend who was soon to be entering the eighth grade.

“You better be sure you’re still friends by that time, so he’ll ask you!” I reminded her, despite my aversion to proms in general. (We got to that topic later.)

“I want to be his friend, but sometimes I don’t know how to be friends with a guy,” she admitted.

At thirteen, I was in much the same boat. So I shared with her some of the things I’d learned over the past seven years of my life about being friends with that great gender called “male.” I’ve seen too many relationships with too much too soon and they don’t last two months, much less until Junior-Senior Prom. So I emphasized again that if this guy was really a keeper, they better stick to being just friends for a long time.

I told the same thing to a girl of 17, and the same thing again to a guy starting college. No one likes to hear it, but the truth is, there can be no love without friendship, and no friendship without time.

Too Soon

My 17-year-old friend met a guy at camp, and after one week, they were practically dating. As I told her, it sounds like the perfect beginning for a happily-ever-after love story. And it can be—I have a cousin about to marry a girl he met at church camp in eighth grade! But a week is also the perfect amount of time to put your best foot forward, to become great friends on the surface, but not enough time to truly become close friends, and not enough time for your faults to come out.

I met some guys at camp. In fact, I hit it off pretty well with one, and we hung out together the entire week. I could easily have fallen for the sweet way he pursued me. We became close friends on the surface, and I cried when I said goodbye to him. But comparing him with another guy friend of mine, whose family and mine have been through everything together in the many years of our friendship, this guy at camp was only an “acquaintance” at best. He didn’t understand the way I ticked, he just thought he did.

Though one week is enough time to become friends, it is far from enough time to develop the bond of a deep friendship that will last a lifetime. So if in eighth grade he seems like a real keeper—keep in touch, and spend many more weeks together through the years! That’s what my cousin and his fiancé did.

Too Much

One girl excitedly shared with me that she chatted online every night with her guy friend, sometimes staying up until 2 a.m. Then, after her parents had given the okay for their relationship, they would talk on the phone each night from two to four hours (but of course, he always placed the phone call). Now what girl wouldn’t love to talk to the man she loved for hours every night? But, there can be too much of a good thing; too much, too fast.

When you are with each other and talking so much, you are unable to step away and view the situation realistically. If every night you’re in a dreamy state after talking together, you don’t even have a chance to miss the other. Seasons of distance and separation are actually very beneficial to a relationship, even though they don’t seem like it at the time (believe me, I know!). As Christopher Marlowe observed, “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.” So when you’re getting to know each other, and learning about loving each other, it is very important not to have too much contact. It blinds you to everything but him.

Too Shallow

I heard of one couple who found out through their instant message conversations that they agreed on “everything” except coffee. Now the internet’s a great way to keep in touch, but internet-only relationships tend to focus on some things (common interests) while ignoring others (like the way you actually interact together, plus character flaws and the sides of your personality that don’t click).

A guy friend and I were born on each other’s due dates. But that doesn’t mean we should get married. Coincidental things in common are never enough to base a relationship on, and yet, things in common are an essential ingredient of relationships! A newly married friend called me one day and exclaimed, “He doesn’t like any of the music I like!” She did know that before marriage—now they got to learn to adapt to the others’ tastes. Agreeing on “little” things like taste in music and movies is a good ingredient for a happy marriage, but it’s not the main ingredient.

My uncle likes to say that you should never marry a person until you’ve been camping with them. It could be he’s biased since he met my aunt on a college camping trip, but regardless, he has a valid point. If you’ve been together when you’re both exhausted and have been through a really hard day, seen each other in that early morning grumpy state of bad breath and messy hair, and are still attracted to each other, then you may have the ingredients for lasting friendship and lasting love.

Too Quickly

Despite the old saying about “love at first sight,” I don’t believe there is any such thing. So when a friend says she’s in love with a guy she just met, I think: In love? No. Twitterpation? Maybe. Infatuation? Majorly! As F. de La Rochefoucauld said, “There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.”

You don’t fall in love; you grow in love. And growing to love someone is a very slow process. True love is refined by tears, trials, and time.

An unknown author once penned these words: “There are many lessons in life that only time can teach you, like how much you love someone. It’s nearly impossible to know that, until you spend your days without them. And then there are those lessons that you can learn only through the beating of your heart, and through feeling such strong emotions that you can barely breathe. Then finally, the essence of time and the power of your heart crossing paths, and the only knowledge you’re left with is the realization that time is the one thing that keeps you from letting go. No, it’s never the embracing, or the kisses. Not the laughter or the tears, only time.”

Too Emotional

It’s not very romantic to clean up after your husband when he has the flu—in fact, those mush-gushy emotions are probably non-existent in those moments—but that’s what love does. Love is not defined by roses, chocolate, and nice feelings. Yes, romantic feelings often are the result of love, and rose and chocolate are a nice way to show or win love, but they are not love itself.

If love were based solely on looks, then a blind person could not love. If love were based entirely on physical expression of love, then the woman whose husband has been at war could not be certain of his love. If love were based entirely on the speaking of those three little words, the mute and deaf could not give or feel love. If love were shown entirely by service to the other, a quadriplegic may be at a loss to find ways to love his wife. And if love were based on feelings, a woman could never be said to love her husband every day of the month.

Love is not defined by one deed or touch or feeling; it is all that and so much more. The Bible says that we know what love is because Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. There is not always “feel-good” emotion in self-sacrificial love.

But at the same time, even though love is a choice, it is not only a choice. As my friend Amanda observed, “Ideally you’d marry for three reasons: because you feel in love, you chose to love him forever and because you want to.” I have had an interested man or two come through my life, whom I could have chosen to marry. I could have made him happy, kept his house, and been a good mother to his children. But John Michael Montgomery’s song “I Can Love You Like That” always comes to mind—I want a guy who will choose to love me like that Country song. Self-sacrificing love knows that feelings are an important part of a relationship. Self-sacrificing love serves and loves the other in all those hundreds of little ways that keep the chemistry in the relationship ‘til you’re 90 and counting.

And it’s only through time that you learn that emotions are rarely reliable, that feelings will always change, but that love never fails.

Too Impatient

A college freshman I knew was frustrated because he couldn’t get past “friendship” to “relationship” with a cute girl he knew. I told him, friendship is the most solid base you could build for a future relationship. Too many people just want to rush into the “more than friends” and they forget that the being friends part is the most important. In the words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “All love that has not friendship for its base, is like a mansion built upon the sand.”

Most of us have observed our parents enough to know that marriage does not always equate with romance. It’s working together, side by side, through the ups and downs, joys and trials of life. To be able to laugh together when you’re totally exhausted is the best part of being married to your best friend. That’s why I always tell people, focus on the friendship first!

Willa Cather wrote, “I think that when friends marry, they are safe.” When friends marry, they can enjoy each other outside of the bedroom. When friends marry, weeding the garden, irrigating the pasture, and washing the dishes are romantic activities simply because they are friends who love each other.

The old saying goes, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” But I plan to marry after years of leisurely growing to love him, and spend the rest of my life growing to love him more! And I reassure myself that all this waiting will make me appreciate my man so much more in the end. As Elisabeth Elliot once wrote to her husband Addison Leitch, “There’s one thing I can give you that no woman on earth can outdo me in and that’s appreciation.”

And as a family friend, Mr. Bill Brandt, once said, “What’s the rush? If he loves you today, he’ll love you tomorrow; if he loves you tomorrow, he’ll love you next week; if he loves you next week, he’ll love you next month; if he loves you next month, he’ll love you next year.”

Two Forever

Anne of Avonlea came to the conclusion that, “Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart it’s pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps... perhaps... love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.”

Though from another era, Country songwriters have come to the same conclusions about love and time. John Michael Montgomery knows that it takes time for love to “sink in”: “When two people care, and they just take their time, love can be a whole lot more than magic.” Billy Currington sings “I Got a Feelin’” but “I don’t wanna rush this thing, I don’t want to jump the gun, I really wanna say those three little words but I’m gonna bite my tongue.” So when you need some encouragement, listen to Carolyn Dawn Johnson’s “One Day Closer” or another Country song to remind you of why you’re waiting for a love like the kind in Country songs instead of the soap operas.

As I told a friend of mine, the best advice I can give you is to leave love to grow naturally, through friendship and time. Because a love refined by time and tears is a love that will stand the test of time...and it’s the bestest kind of love ever!

In the words of Lois Wyse, “Someone asked me to name the time our friendship stopped and love began. Oh, my darling, that’s the secret. Our friendship never stopped.”