Fairy tales impart the message that there is only one person in the world for us and once we find each other that state of euphoria will last forever till death do us part. But we all know life’s not really like that. We know, for example, that one out of two marriages ends in divorce; that some marriages that last can be abusive or destructive of personhood. It’s hard with what we know today to believe in fairy tales. The title of a popular collection of revisionist versions perhaps says it best—Don’t Bet on the Prince. No, we no longer believe in fairy tales—or do we?

How many of you have seen the movie, The Notebook? Based on a best-selling Phillip Sparks novel, it has been a huge commercial success. The movie appears to chronicle two different stories. First, there is the present-day story of two elderly residents of a nursing home, where Duke, the man, reads from a hand-written notebook to Allie, a woman suffering from Alzheimers. She doesn’t seem to know who he is and forgets that he reads to her everyday. But once the narrative begins, she has brief moments of lucid memory. Parallel to this is the story contained in The Notebook, the tale of two lovers from opposite sides of the track. Noah is a smart but poor country boy destined to a life as lumber mill worker. Allie is a sophisticated rich-girl spending one more season with her parents in their South Carolina summer home before she is off to college. They are both gorgeous and once they set eyes on each other, they immediately fall in love and lust. Their romance proceeds through a series of cliche laden Hollywood scenes—the cute, stupid things they do on dates, the lovers’ quarrels that end in torrid kisses, the rowboat trip down a peaceful stream in the glow of a humongous orange sunset. You get the picture?

As the movie alternates between these two stories, it comes as no surprise that the youthful lovers and the elderly couple are one and the same, albeit separated in time by some sixty years. Nor is it any surprise that the two star-crossed young lovers encounter obstacles to their romance. And so the difficulties pile on—Allie’s parents cut short their summer vacation and send her off to college early. They intercept Noah’s love letters to Allie which he writes daily for an entire year. Meanwhile a little thing like World War II also conspires to keep the lovers apart. And by war’s end Allie is engaged to be married to a suitably rich and accomplished young lawyer. The wedding is only a few days away but—well you know the ending. Noah and Allie really, really love each other and they are meant to be together, and so nothing can keep them apart. What keeps this predictable saga from being irredeemably cloying is the parallel story of the elderly couple with its poignant, tender scenes of devotion and sacrifice, of love that has endured despite physical and mental decline. And even though you know while watching it that all your Hallmark-card emotional buttons are being pushed, you can’t help but root for the young lovers and even some of the critics who panned the movie as unbearably sappy, admitted that at the movie’s end, when the two nursing home residents share a final amorous night together, they were wiping tears from their eyes.

Personally, I left the theater with a wad of soppy Kleenex and clinging to my dear husband, Mark! In spite of its maddeningly misleading portrayal of Alzheimers, in spite of its wildly improbably plot twists, in spite of its time-worn fairy tale formula, still it got to me. Who doesn’t want to believe that love and passion can last, that the hot flames of youthful attraction can be still-smoldering embers at journey’s end? Who doesn’t want to die together with your beloved wrapped in each other’s arms?

So what’s the problem, you might ask. If the problem with fairy tales is that there is no life lived in between the falling in love and the final after of the happily ever after, then the problem with the movie The Notebook is that there is no life lived in between the reunion of the young lovers and death’s final embrace—and in this tale that is sixty years of living. How do we keep love and passion alive after the idealized projections of love-at-first-sight fall and the inevitable disillusionment and routine of everyday living set in? How do we sustain commitment for the long haul—not just in our primary relationships, but with any commitment of depth—in friendship, in commitment to institutions, even in commitment to a church?

There is a point in any relationship—whether with a person or an organization—when we become aware that the object of our affections is, alas, imperfect, and fallible. And, if we are honest, there is a similar point, when we ourselves realize that we are not capable of sustaining the better self that we thought this great love evoked in us, that we cannot forever match the image we saw reflected in our lover’s eye. And this is the point that many attachments falter, wrecked upon the shores of reality. We’ve all seen marriages, unions, torn apart to the echo of recriminations: “You’re not the same person I married!” And haven’t we seen it happen in our churches, too? People who fall in love with Unitarian Universalism, who heady with our religious freedom, our message of acceptance, compassion and justice, exclaim, “I’ve been looking for a church like this all my life” and then dive in only to discover that our churches are, surprise!, imperfect, comprised of fallible human beings, that we are not always as compassionate, accepting and just as we aspire to be; and, maybe what is harder to take, realize, too, that becoming a member of a UU church doesn’t automatically make one that better person we all long to become. Often people leave us at this critical juncture, feeling betrayed.

But what about the people who stay—stay in marriages and unions, stay in churches—beyond that period of disillusionment? What is it that enables us to, as one of my favorite psychologists, John McDargh, says, “endure the realization that the objects of my attachment are at their best less than my idealizations would have them be and at their worst better than my severe judgements upon them?” What is it that enables any of us also to maintain “trust in my fundamental worth and loveableness in spite of the fact that I show up invariably less than my lofty expectations for myself and yet more adequate than my worst fears?” What makes commitment last?

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day—and so it seems incumbent upon me to offer some words of wisdom on the subject of love. But I have to tell you, preaching on or near Valentine’s Day can fell like entering a minefield. After all, volumes have been written on the subject. And in any given congregation there are those who are madly deeply in love, and those who are justifiably contemplating divorce; those whose love has endured the test of time and those who are single and very glad of it; those who are mourning the death of a beloved partner and those who have finally had the courage to end an abusive relationship; and those who are die-hard romantics and those who are steely eyed cynics on the subject of love. I may be entering in where angels fear to tread—but I offer you a few humble observations on what I think can help love stay, commitments endure.

First, I think The Notebook got it right on at least one point -the importance of telling the story of your love, over and over again to one another—remembering when and how you met, remembering what first attracted you and then how that love grew. Telling the story not only helps rekindle the love that was shared and helps us to remember the beloved as we once saw them, but it also recalls each partner to the promise each felt for themselves in the embrace of that love. Noah’s reading of the Notebook to Allie is not just a devise to reawaken Allie’s memory, to try to give her life back to her, but it also restores in Noah’s sight the way he once was seen in his lover’s eyes and it is that vision that enables him to keep faithful to a woman who rarely recognizes him. Reading the notebook restores his life as well.

Every year on our anniversary Mark and I tell each other the story of how we met and how we fell in love. Some of the story actually happened! And some of it has the quality of mythos, of something larger than fact. And we know that—but we let ourselves be swept up again by that larger than life feeling, let ourselves remember that yes he was my Prince Charming, and I was his Magic Princess—and so we become, again, in the present, though older and balder and slacker of skin; test of wills, petty annoyances and failings aside. We allow ourselves to see as beautiful what we once saw as beautiful—and so it becomes again. And then we tell the rest of the story—all the in between stuff -all that living side by side, hard though it has occasionally been, all the joy and sorrow that we have walked through together. By doing so we acknowledge there is so much more to the other than we first saw, that it is possible to appreciate each other’s divergence from one’s early expectations, not as disappointment, but as exciting invitation to yet more experience. C. S. Lewis, writing after the death of his wife in A Grief Observed, said, “The earthly beloved . . . incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image . . . is what we are to love.”

Telling the story is important. And so, too, is remembering the promises you made, recalling the covenant that binds you together. Covenants are an expression of how you will treat each other, of what values and meanings you will uphold in your relationship. Marriages and unions are covenantal agreements. But they are not the only relationships based on covenant. Churches have covenants of membership. Friendships also, at least implicitly, have covenants. And the beauty of covenants, unlike contracts, is that by their very nature they recognize human fallibility because you can violate the terms of a covenant without breaking the covenant itself. The covenant remains to call both parties back to renewal. As the Rumi poem on which our opening hymn is based puts it, “Though you’ve broken your vows a thousand times, come, yet again, come.”

Celia is one of my dearest friends. She was my college roommate. And before I moved here to Houston, Celia and I both lived in the DC area for over fifteen years. We saw each other regularly, talked on the phone several times a week. We’ve been good friends, there for one another in the tough times, and there to help celebrate each other’s joys. And when I moved we promised each other that distance wasn’t going to compromise our friendship. But in the five and a half years I’ve been living in Houston, I’ve been to visit Celia several times and she’s been to visit me exactly once. She keeps meaning to come, has even bought tickets to come; but something always seems to interfere—usually her work. She has a demanding job, but it’s not that it’s so demanding as that Celia doesn’t know when to stop working. And so she keeps canceling out on me, feeling like she can’t possibly get away. But, I keep telling her she has to come, keep insisting on setting a date. The last time I talked to her she said, “You’re going to make me be a good friend, aren’t you.” “Yep,” I said. You see, there’ve been times in our friendship when I wasn’t such a good friend either and she let me know it then. And her calling me to account at those times had the effect of making me want to truly be that good friend she expected of me and so I do the same for her now. Remembering the promises you have made not only renews one’s own commitment but also reawakens the potential of the other in the relationship, reawakens their desire to be such an object of desire.

And finally, I would remind us all, myself included, that love, as the psychiatrist Willard Gaylin puts, it, “is not a zero sum game.” Love is not like a fixed sum of money that once it’s spent it’s gone. No, love is regenerative—it feeds on itself. The more love we give, the more love there is to give. Sometimes when we are hungry for love, we wait for love to come to us. But love is an active rather than a passive phenomenon and the instrument for loving is within the self. If we freely distribute the love we possess, it is more likely that love will return to bless us. But even if it does not, the act of loving is its own reward. When I was younger, I wanted most to be loved, but the older I get the more I realize that to feel love for others is a much greater experience. And that I think may be the best wisdom I can offer. For the love we have for our mates, our friends, the members of our church is of the same nature and kind as the love which can cross boundaries of race and class, the same kind of love that creates communion and discovers intimacy with and empathy for the stranger. Our faith tradition calls us to love unreservedly, to see ourselves as part of a great covenant of being. And it is in the act of loving that such a love will grow.