The Jew­ish Book Coun­cil is delight­ed to pub­lish a con­tin­u­ing blog series in part­ner­ship with Ask Big Ques­tions, an ini­tia­tive out of Hil­lel Inter­na­tion­al aimed at get­ting peo­ple to talk about issues of heart, soul and com­mu­ni­ty. Each month, Ask Big Ques­tions will fea­ture a JBC author on their blog, shared here on the JBC Pros­en­Peo­ple blog page, and in cam­pus pro­gram­ming reach­ing over 10,000 col­lege and grad­u­ate students.

Devan Sipher is a writer for The New York Times and is cur­rent­ly tour­ing through the 2014 – 2015 JBC Net­work with his sec­ond nov­el, The Scenic Route.

How do we love, when we know that the per­son we love will even­tu­al­ly leave us, vol­un­tar­i­ly or involuntarily?

For the last ten years, I have writ­ten about wed­dings for The New York Times. (In the movie 27 Dress­es, the actor James Mars­den was said to be por­tray­ing me, but with bet­ter hair.) So I have heard more than my fair share of cou­ples vow­ing unmit­i­gat­ed pas­sion and devo­tion. (Bridal cou­ples aren’t known for under­state­ment.) But every promise made on a wed­ding day has an explic­it expi­ra­tion date, i.e., ​“as long as we both shall live.”

Even at the moment when we are most focused on unit­ing with anoth­er per­son, we are also focused on the finite nature of that union. With­out even address­ing the many ways a rela­tion­ship can dete­ri­o­rate over time, the best case sce­nario for love is mourn­ing the loss of the per­son we hold most dear (or being the one to leave that per­son bereft). 

We hope that moment is many decades away, but it could just as eas­i­ly be much less. Planes drop out of cerulean skies. Can­cer cells invade sup­ple tissue. 

As Jews, we don’t believe in a here­after where we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be reunit­ed with loved ones. It would be eas­i­er if we did, but ​“dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return” is not a phi­los­o­phy that lends itself to roman­tic notions of an afterlife.

So love, like reli­gion itself, becomes an act of faith.

We leap into love hop­ing that the joy we will gain off­sets the pain we are like­ly to even­tu­al­ly endure. We gam­ble our youth and our vital ener­gy on some­thing that is invis­i­ble and inscrutable, all the while know­ing that the more we cher­ish someone’s com­pan­ion­ship, the more pro­found will be our lone­li­ness in its absence. 

So it’s no sur­prise that many hes­i­tate at the altar of com­mit­ment. Books and blogs and women’s mag­a­zines over­flow with tales of those unable to trust com­plete­ly and love whole­heart­ed­ly. For many peo­ple, there is a fear of giv­ing one­self com­plete­ly and being deplet­ed in the process. And to what end?

I have writ­ten about peo­ple who have lost spous­es pre­ma­ture­ly to hor­ri­ble dis­eases. I have writ­ten about peo­ple who have watched loved ones with­er phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly over gru­el­ing months and years. It’s exhaust­ing to mere­ly con­tem­plate the strength and sta­mi­na required. 

But per­haps, like the phys­i­cal body, the spir­it only grows when it encoun­ters resistance. 

If we don’t run or swim or lift weights or spin, our bod­ies have a ten­den­cy to get lumpy and mis­shapen. And it is very pos­si­ble the same is true for our souls. It is pos­si­ble that the moan­ing and the cry­ing, the hop­ing and the pray­ing, and even the late-night binges on pints of ice cream all play a part in strength­en­ing our souls. Of course, there’s no guar­an­tee that we have souls. There’s no guar­an­tee of any­thing about life, except for death.

And there’s the rub. Love poten­tial­ly mag­ni­fies the exis­ten­tial pain of our mor­tal­i­ty. Yet love is a force strong enough to allow us to believe we are more than just dust. When we love do we tran­scend the phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of our mus­cles and mol­e­cules? Or do we fall vic­tim to a cos­mic Ponzi scheme? Is love a sign of a divine spark with­in us? Or is even ask­ing that ques­tion pre­sup­pos­ing things we can’t pos­si­bly know?

In the end, we don’t know. We hope. We fear. But we don’t know. Or at least, not until it’s too late. It would be the ulti­mate irony to be pro­vid­ed with the answers to life’s ques­tions on the thresh­old of death. And it would poten­tial­ly be the ulti­mate loss. So maybe the ques­tion isn’t ​“How do we love?” but ​“How do we not?”

Devan Sipher is a writer of the Vows wed­ding col­umn in The New York Times and the author of two nov­els. He has also writ­ten for oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing The For­ward and The Huff­in­g­ton Post. He grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, received an M.F.A. from New York Uni­ver­si­ty, and he is a for­mer junior can­tor of Tem­ple Israel. For more, please vis­it www​.devan​sipher​.com.

Relat­ed content:

• Devan Sipher: 6 Things I Learned Writ­ing About Wed­dings for The New York Times
• Essays on Death, Mourn­ing, and Loss
• Essays on Dat­ing, Love, and Marriage