Love Beyond Practicality

I came to Paige with little more than a backpack and a beat-down van. I had nothing to offer her. I didn’t come from wealth. My family was disconnected and scattered. I was getting divorced. I didn’t live there, and I was leaving the state within the month. 

   The night we met, I was dirty and covered in roofing material, with cheap, disposable clothes beneath it all. My boss was not the greatest wingman, making inappropriate remarks, as he often enjoys doing. Love you, man. When I asked for her number, she turned me down, saying she had a boyfriend. A boyfriend who lived there. A boyfriend with money and family. But we had seen each other. Really seen each other. 

   We were both ethically motivated vegans at the time, Paige for six years and me for seven. The issue is, if you want to truly source your food ethically and end the fewest lives to feed yourself, you will be looking at the number of calories yielded per conscious life. You might even consider the degree of consciousness within the life you’re ending. 

   But if you’re shopping at a store, most of the vegetables you’re eating have been farmed with the kinds of equipment that will invariably chew up rabbits, opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, squirrels, fawns, and more. I was vegan because it was an easy rule of thumb when shopping somewhere like Walmart, but it’s not so simple if you want to cause as little harm as possible. However, vegans can often be ideologically militant and inflexible. Most of us, when identified with a group, lean toward groupthink.

   So I asked Paige, “A deer yields so many thousands of calories, but farming an equivalent number of calories from certain calorically deficient plants can result in the death of more animals than the deer you might hunt yourself. Wouldn’t it be more ethical to hunt the deer over eating certain plants?” And she agreed… immediately. So even after she turned me down, I gave her my number.

   Paige has said since then that even as early as that night, she had the sense that the person who arrived just before closing was going to change her life. I suppose I felt something too, because before we were even dating, on only our third time seeing each other, I told her she should get rid of everything she owned and move into a backpack with me.

   Our love was born from nothing superficial, but from an appreciation for each other’s heart and mind. Although everything external to us would disfavor our relationship, including family and friends, when you find a glimmer of that kind of character in this tribal, irrational, and compromised world, you abandon everything for it. Not for the utility of another’s rational mind, but for the love of their purity.

   Love goes beyond any “practical” consideration, for love is more practical than any other consideration. We pursue “practicality” with the misunderstanding that it will lead us to happiness and fulfillment, but only purity and love can lead us to the place we hope to find ourselves. A perfectly practical life devoid of love is a cold pit in which to dwell, but an impractical yet uncompromising life lived in love, for the sake of love, is the end of worldly want. Love is all that’s truly worth anything.