Sanford

It's a pity that the discussion revolving around this highly personal event in Mark Sanborn's life isn't garnering slightly more empathetic and perhaps wistful views of love in modern middle age. After all, reading the rags I do, we've been bombarded this week with criticisms of the institution of marriage and (reviews of) tomes on the bankrupt state of romantic love in our society.

And here is Mark Sanborn showing us that romantic love is clearly not dead.

We all knew it wasn't, really. Romantic love is going to stick around, probably forever, because that's the way it's done all over the animal kingdom. If your species has two sexes, you probably have courtship behavior. Likewise, if your species enjoys social groups, your young have a long gestation or juvenile period, and mating pairs form long-term bonds, it's more likely that your courtship is going to be really complex. That's why sociologists and anthropologists study it. But in more than a social or cultural aspect, it's a combination of events and mutually-reinforcing behaviors and emotions.

Courtship = Attraction + Respect + Fear of Rejection

That's a very clinical description for a scenario that we are very lucky to have to undergo with any degree of intensity in our lives.

You are thunderstruck by the other human being. From the daily scenery of faces, the other stands in relief. When you see them, your heart drops through your stomach as though the elevator you were in started going up much too fast. The other is "interesting," a trait that becomes more novel and fragile the older you get. You may or may not experience your loins stirring. The other is a wonder. That's the beginning. What happens next gets way more complicated depending on your situation.

Those of us who satisfy the twin requirements of responsibility and domestication tend to extinguish and compartmentalize until whatever strange fire afflicting our emotional ship burns itself out. This path more chosen makes trades we may later regret; we limit the emotional damage to ourselves and regret a lost opportunity later in lieu of loving (boldly or secretly), experiencing, learning. The institutions we build in this life are too fragile to risk even at the cost of the expansion of our souls. Just look at Sanborn. He loved, and lost. He lost the other, his career, the relationship with his spouse, with his children, his financial security, and the integrity of his psychological home. Maybe more.

But he will always have the memory of her.

It's clear that Mark Sanborn is a Good Man. He's acted like a man in so many ways here. Here's Sanborn being man (enough) to be stunned by another and to compartmentalize. Then man enough to give into those emotions. Man enough to go with it and act on those emotions. Man enough to admit a lapse of responsibility. Man enough to apologize for it all to a roomful of strangers who he never wronged, but may have had events unfolded differently. And he did it internationally.

Probably a better man than I.