Loved, Past Tense

Grammar can carry a philosophy if you let it. Consider the three tenses of the word love.

To love is the verb in the present. It names an action under way.

To be in love is a state. It names a condition you are living through.

To be loved, in the past tense, names something that has happened and is now complete.

Most of our songs and stories are about the second of these, being in love. We treat it as the summit. But if what this book has said so far is true, the summit is somewhere else. The summit is the past tense.

In love is in motion

To be in love is to be in motion. It is to be in the middle of the process of restoration. Something is unsettled, something is being met, and it is not finished yet.

Think about how being in love actually feels. It is wonderful, and it is also restless. You cannot sleep. You check your phone. You replay conversations. You wonder whether it will last. There is longing in it, and longing is the feeling of a gap that has not yet closed. Being in love requires faith, because you are trusting that the motion will come to rest, that the restoration will arrive.

No one truly wants to stay there forever, however sweet it is. The person who is in love wants, underneath it all, to arrive. They want the restless motion to become a settled fact. They want to be able to say, without anxiety, this is done, this is real, I have been met.

Loved is at rest

To have been loved is to have arrived.

When love has done its work, the disturbance is gone. She is still again. She is complete again. Nothing further needs to happen. That is where love comes to rest, and it is a state described entirely in the past tense: loved. Restored. Done.

So love's natural tense is the past. Its work is not to linger in longing, or to keep you waiting for an eventual fulfillment. Its work is finished when you have been loved, already, settled into the record of things that have truly happened.

The measure, again

In the chapter on intelligent spontaneity I offered a simple measure, and it belongs here too.

Is she still? Is she complete? Is she at peace?

If yes, she is loved, past tense. The work is done, and no amount of further effort would make it more done. If no, love is in progress, present tense. You are working toward restoring her, but she has not yet arrived.

This measure is merciful in two directions. It is merciful to the one who loves, because it does not demand endless striving once the restoration is complete. And it is merciful to the one who is loved, because it does not demand that she prove she has been loved by saying thank you or loving back. Her stillness is the proof.

You did that

There is a sentence I want you to be able to say about someone in your life, and I want you to be able to say it plainly, without pride and without false modesty.

You loved them.

Not that you tried to. Not that you meant to. Not that you were willing. That you did. That at some moment, they were disturbed, and you met the disturbance with what they needed, drawn from what they already were, and they came to rest. And that moment is now history. It happened. It is part of the finished record of the world, and nothing that comes after can make it not have happened.

They may never have thanked you. They may not even know what you did. It does not matter. They were loved. You did that.

What cannot be taken

Here is the gift hidden in the past tense, and it is the reason I have given this idea its own chapter.

What is in the past cannot be taken.

The present can be taken from you. The future can certainly be taken from you; it was never yours to begin with. But what has happened has happened. It belongs to her, to the Immutable Past, and she does not give anything back and does not let anything go. Every moment in which someone was loved is held in her permanently.

This means that if you were loved, even once, even briefly, even by someone who later failed you, you were loved. That fact is now part of the immutable record. No betrayal that came after can reach back and undo it. No death can undo it. No forgetting can undo it.

We will return to this when we talk about grief, near the end of the book. For now, let it sit with you as a simple fact about grammar and about the world: the past tense of love is the one tense that cannot be revoked.

You have been loved, past tense, in more moments than you will ever be able to count. They are all still there. They are all still true.