Beyond Valentine’s Day: Examples of Love and Devotion From History

History reveals couples of great love and devotion. “A Lover’s Token,” 1830, by Charles Moreau. (Art Renewal Center)

Who can explain it, who can tell you why? Fools can’t explain it, wise men never try.

Those lines from “Some Enchanted Evening,” one of the numbers in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “South Pacific,” are speaking of love, particularly love at first sight. But are they accurate? Can love not be explained?

Let’s imagine that Sam has just returned home from a get-together with friends. While at the party, he has become smitten with a stranger, Maggie. Restless, he paces his apartment, wondering whether Maggie would consider him strange if he called her in the morning (he asked for and received her phone number) and invited her to supper for Valentine’s Day.

So, who can explain this attraction? Lots of experts might give it a shot. A professor of aesthetics might credit Maggie’s high cheekbones, the light in her eyes, and the slight tremor in her voice. A psychologist could point to commonalities, the fact that both Sam and Maggie lost their mothers at an early age and enjoy listening to Bach while reading. A scientist might speculate that pheromones were the cause of Sam’s instant attraction.

Who can explain this attraction? "Lovers in a Garden," by Cesare-Auguste Detti. (Art Renewal Center)

The truth is, no one really knows. When all is said and done, all these explanations echo what Thomas Aquinas said of his theological works: “Everything that I have written seems like straw to me compared to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me.” Always in the end, the lover runs up against a conundrum—a missing piece, that “je ne sais quoi” that lies beyond the descriptive powers of language. Love is, as Winston Churchill once described Russia, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

Beyond Beguiled

Now, let’s leave Sam to the pleasures and torments of his interior debate and return to “Some Enchanted Evening,” which ends with this line: “Once you have found her, never let her go.” So arise more questions: How is that possible to never let her, or him, go? After being shot through with Cupid’s arrows, how do couples stay together year after year, through good times and bad?

Here, we are on firmer ground. We can approach our grandparents and inquire as to how they made their marriage work for 50 years. We can ask our close friend how she and her husband—they seem reasonably happy but don’t always see eye to eye—keep their marriage alive. We can seek out counselors or read self-help books.

Or if we wish, and if we want to stick to real-life examples, we can hop into our time machines, otherwise known as books and histories, and study some examples from the past.

I’ve Got Your Back

Winston and Clementine Churchill at Epsom racecourse for the Derby, June 4, 1949. (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1909, newly married Clementine and Winston Churchill arrived at a Bristol railway station for a meet-and-greet with local party members. Upset that Churchill had opposed the vote for women, a suffragette suddenly attacked him and violently shoved him toward the railroad track. Though Clementine favored the vote for women, she rushed into this fracas and seized Winston by his coattails, preventing him from possible injury or death on the track.

In her article “How Winston Churchill’s Wife Helped Him Become a Great Statesman,” Erin Blakemore not only recounts that incident but also gives us other examples of Clementine’s aid and devotion to her husband in his political battles. She remained staunchly in his camp during his wilderness period of the 1930s, when his power in Parliament was at ebb tide, always offering words of encouragement. The couple sometimes quarreled—Clementine once threw a plate of spinach at Winston in an argument about money—but more often they called each other by pet names and lived together compatibly. Churchill regarded her as the key to his success in public life.

Sacrifice

In May of 1884, Ulysses Grant, commander of the Northern armies during the Civil War, who was then elected president of the United States, found himself completely broke seven years after leaving the White House, the victim of a Ponzi scheme. Between him and his wife, Julia, they had only $210 and were heavily in debt. A few months later, Grant was diagnosed with an incurable and fatal cancer of the throat.

Though Mark Twain, a friend, had urged Grant for years to write his memoirs, he had resisted, refusing to profit from his service to his country. Now, facing death and desperate to provide for Julia and his family, he set to work, writing up to 10,000 words a day with the same determination he had shown when fighting opponents on the battlefield. After months of enormous suffering (he eventually lost the ability to speak), he completed his 366,000-word manuscript just seven days before taking his last breath.

Today, the “Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant” is regarded as one of the finest of American autobiographies. Yet it behooves us who are interested in examples of love and devotion to remember that this courageous man suffered through this agonizing ordeal not for personal glory, but to provide for his wife after his death.

We’re a Team

G.K. Chesterton and his beloved wife, Frances. (Courtesy of the Chesterton Society)

Perhaps the best-known story about G.K. Chesterton rests on the telegram that the notoriously absent-minded writer and speaker sent to his wife, Frances: “Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?”

Chesterton was a romantic regarding life. On his way from the altar to his honeymoon, for instance, he stopped and bought a glass of milk and a pistol, purchasing the latter, he said, “with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound.” He was joking, of course, but for him, every day was an adventure, which often led to some confusion and mix-ups.

Fortunately, he married a level-headed woman. Frances Blogg was also a writer, but she was as well Chesterton’s guide into Christianity and his “business manager, organizer, and reminder of deadlines.” Like Clementine Churchill, Frances is credited by Chesterton’s biographers as crucial to his career. In the article “The Woman Beside the Man, Frances Chesterton,” Stephanie Mann writes that she “was her husband’s companion and lover, muse and friend. She helped him achieve greatness.” And as Frances herself wrote to a friend, Father John O’Connor, after Chesterton’s death: “How do lovers love without each other? We were always lovers.”

Mutual Interests

A love of science bound Pierre and Marie Curie together, shown here circa 1903. (Public Domain)

Sharing a passion can deepen this sense of being a team.

Perhaps the greatest example can be seen in Marie and Pierre Curie. A love of science bound them together, and their long hours of work in a laboratory not only produced monumental achievements in science but also deepened their love for each other. When in 1903 they won a Nobel Prize in physics for their work in radiation, Marie at first went unrecognized until Pierre insisted her name be added to that commendation. She then became the first woman to receive that award.

And three years later, after Pierre died as the result of an accident involving a horse-drawn carriage, the grieving Marie honored his memory by taking his place at the Sorbonne, the first female professor to teach there, and by creating a laboratory in his name. “Pierre had dedicated his life to his dream of science,” Marie wrote. “He felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him.”

He found that companion in Marie.

Whatever the activity—hiking, gardening, reading, starting up a business together—shared enterprises often make couples friends as well as partners.

Everlasting Friendship

Intellectual equals, quick to defend each other, Abigail and John Adams were companions for 54 years. (L-R) Portrait of Abigail Adams and John Adams, between 1800 and 1815, by Gilbert Stuart. (Public Domain)

In the marriage of John and Abigail Adams, we find all of the above qualities. While John was frequently absent from home attending various meetings or on missions abroad (both during and after the American Revolution), his stout-hearted wife, Abigail, operated their farm, saw to the education of their children, and wrote a flood of letters giving her slant on the politics of the moment.

More than a thousand of their letters to each other remain extant. Here, they frequently addressed each other as “Dearest friend.” Intellectual equals, quick to defend each other, they were companions for 54 years. After Abigail’s death from typhoid fever in 1818, Adams wrote, “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.”

Husband and wife, yes, but also two lifelong companions walking the path side by side. Like the others mentioned above, John and Abigail fell in love, and they stayed in love until the day they left this earth.

In a culture such as ours, with its emphasis on personal freedom and self-satisfaction, potential suitors like our fictional Sam, and the rest of us as well, might learn a thing or two about true love by acquainting ourselves with these stories of sacrifice, devotion, and intimacy from the past.