The Hope of Young Love

Recently I was walking down a hall in a medical building and passed a series of windows that looked into a waiting room. Virtually everyone in that waiting room was older, and they were there with their spouse.

My first impression was that most of these couples were looking at their smart phones instead of at each other. I mused, with a great deal of judgment, that all of them had once been so hopeful that the other would find interest in them… maybe even find them charming. But now, there they were, oblivious to each other — totally involved in what they held in their hands.

“Ouch,” I thought, “so this is what the hope and anticipation of young love finally amounts to.”

But since then, I’ve come to quite another opinion, because I’ve also come to realize that none of them were there alone.

Each of them was there with someone they had known for a very long time. They were with someone whom they could no longer surprise, and who had seen them at their very worst (probably numerous times.) Yet still, in that moment, they were still convinced that their best place in all the world was with that other person — sitting there in the florescent ambiance of a doctor’s waiting room… being ignored.

“Yes,” I thought, “perhaps this is what the young should hope for when they think about love.”