APRIL 2026 SULLYGRAM:  What keeps love alive in a threatened marriage? Constant good looks? Doubt it. Over time, appearance in a spouse becomes more an extension of ourselves or our family in public, waxing and waning for better or worse. One of the funniest lines I’ve ever heard was Jessi Colter’s mother telling Waylon Jennings “Son, that beard and mustache sure look like a bunch of nasty ants going to a funeral.” Dare I risk a short answer then? Oh. I think I just said the word. It’s risk. Fear of losing something that has value in the marketplace can be life support to an endangered marriage.

Ironic that a thing as fulfilling as romantic custody should be amplified by fear. But it goes right along with high risk-high reward. You never put more on the line than when you commit to an intimate life partnership. More than time, more than assets, all the enhancements of self-worth, libido, ego, emotional and psychological welfare go with it. We are driven in life to survive and thrive, to answer our needs optimally. Even if your drive is to be basically altruistic and serve others, that’s a need (call it semantics, and I won’t argue). Still, the risk of having all that status and exposure you take on with another human end in denouncement runs deep. Even if the bond is withering, fears may stir embers of romance turning cold.

As a teenager, long ago and far away, I struggled with cynicism about romantic love and deciding whether to believe in it or call it by Freud’s definition: “…the overestimation of the sex object.” Eventually I was able to say, “Hey, Sigmund, so what!” The urge to merge drives everything in nature from aardvarks to alley cats, doesn’t it? And when you are at the top of Mom Nature’s cranial pecking order you discover not just physical sex but elaborate sexuality – a sophisticated human brand of fulfillment way beyond orgasms.

Must’ve been a whole lot more he-ing and she-ing going on in bygone times than formal history reveals, but you have to read between the lines to get past pragmatic rites and customs. Marrying for love has been somewhat quaint across recorded cultures. Marriages were often arranged through families, and class boundaries were focused on practical reasons, status, economics or power all the way from commoners and merchant class through alliances of nobility and nations. A woman went from her father’s house to her husband’s, and the prospective groom asked permission to marry from her patriarch. There was nothing like a good ol’ dowery to make an acceptable match or a blooded heir to cement two kingdoms. Many of today’s cultures still scoff at romantic love. But in Western society romance seems to be the sine qua non, even blended into the most ardent feminist agendas. Through it all, courtship remains a litmus test of attraction and intent – driven, as I said at the start, by fear of losing something. Cue Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared.”

But what would romantic excitement be without the possibility of rejection? Doesn’t the call to marshal our best selves make us feel vital? It’s in the wind and the stars, in our DNA, a secret awakening customized in each of us. You may not be aware of a romantic ideal that comes out of all the begats in your ancestry – blueprints and coordinates made of sensory cues and imprints on your radar – but you know it when you see it.

Lots of false positives maybe along the way. Sparks but no fire. Could be you fan a lot of embers until they become ashes. Could be you plant whole trees in flower pots doomed to wither from truncated roots. Yet, when your heart leaps with urgency, you still answer the call. So, I don’t know exactly whence the cynicism in my life, or why it came so early. I was pretty dumb when it came to love. And shy. And prone to idealize the fairer sex. Altogether, a walking idiot.

7^th grade I was 12. I remember it well. It was right after I was 11. The classroom was a very mixed bag, and the standout female student – Marlene – was probably 16. Standout looker on account of her age but dumb as a box of rocks. What looked perfect must be perfect, I thought, and I don’t think it ever occurred to me that there was a reason she was 16 in the 7^th grade.

Everything we said was dumb…in my case, numb and dumb. But, of course, she sounded like a paragon of wisdom to me. “I was 12 when we moved here,” she said. “I remember it well. It was right after I was 11.”

Profound.

I said something like “I moved a lot too. I’ve been in your shoes” (I think we were barefoot in a park at the time). Holy shit, I was talking to the gleaming goddess of Farragut Elementary school, 7^th grade, and we were actually sustaining a conversation. Somewhere in that fog, trying to sound older, I believe I said, “You make me feel young again.” She was telling me she was learning guitar and that someone told her to sing along when you play and it would help with rhythm. “Yeah,” I said, “I do the same thing when I play sax.” “You sing while you play sax?” she marveled. Pause. Deep thought. “Yeah…actually I just hum. You can hum a little when you play sax. Sort of like a kazoo.” I didn’t play the sax back then. I played the kazoo. Then her high school boyfriend drove up in a car.

It taught me nothing. Only that Freud was probably right. I lacked the ability to see past ideals, and ideals arrived like lightning whereas thunder came late. I read Booth Tarkington’s SEVENTEEN and met myself under the pseudonym William Sylvanus Baxter. Ditto Billy Budd, Candide, Huck Finn, Peter Pan, Mr. Toad, and Prince Lyov Nikalayevich Myshkin.

There is never an age or a stage in our lives that doesn’t change with time, never a decade where we don’t revise who we were and rationalize that we’ve become better. But often it’s because the assets we depended on for self-worth and market value fade. Fair enough, but if you pretend you’ve graduated to a superior truth about yourself, invalidating everything you were, you are simply compensating for the change. The sour grapes of aging make bitter wine. Renounce what you were, and you lose the romance of who you are. Much better to drink the deeper elixir of romance brewed with memories of what was and a celebration of what you’ve truly gained. Call it metamorphosis without needing to kill the pupa. Romance, unlike the finnicky negotiation of untested love, is a richer vintage than just passion. But – and here’s the key – it is not passionless. Keep your ageless romantic ideals alive. Take them along for your journey – your journal. The first entries you made are still there, and now you’ve written many more to include events and growth. Do not take them for granted. Let them compound with interest like bank accounts. They are your literal lifeline, your perpetuity on this mortal coil. Treat them like tinder an inch away from a flame.

Romance is not giving up, not defeat. Romance at its keenest is still an essential risk. A chance to win; a risk to lose. That’s why it awakens vitality. If your libido is on life support, or your live body is living with someone else’s dead mind, you can choose to rest in peace or breathe fire into your thoughts, your imagination. Life – especially romance – takes place from the neck up as well as the neck down.

Video clip is from a couple years ago. Too busy lovin’ livin’ to find a third place to stand and take pictures just now.
https://www.facebook.com/thomas.sullivan.395/videos/569960934049932 .

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan