I Love Love

Monday, June 29, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! The now classic film, Father of the Bride, begins with the lead character, George Banks (played by Steve Martin), narrating, “I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say ‘I do.’ I was wrong. That’s getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition.”[1] I saw that movie a few years after it came out and I was hooked. Hooked, that is, on planning my own wedding. It would be a big affair conducted during mass in a grand church and followed by a multiple-course meal with a huge cake. How would we pay for this extravagance, you ask? Well, if we trust the writers of Father of the Bride (we shouldn’t), paying for the wedding was the responsibility of the bride’s family.[2] As I got older, the gender of the person I’d be marrying changed as did the venue of the ceremony and eventually the expense of the reception, but I remain very opinionated about the specifics of weddings and their receptions.

My good friend Siobhan Boyd-Nelson, who serves as LOVEboldly’s Board Chair, has a way of saying things that stop me in my tracks. One of her often quoted phrases is profoundly simple: “I love love.” Just three words. But the way she says it, as if it’s the most obvious and important thing in the world turns it into theology.

I've been thinking about those three words a lot over the last several weeks, and especially yesterday, as I stood before two of my dearest friends and officiated the renewal of their wedding vows.

Married for twelve years already and high school sweethearts to boot, their marriage has weathered things that would have broken many couples, including one partner coming out as Trans and their subsequent transition. What could have been an ending became, for them, a deepening. Watching them look at each other yesterday, I saw two people who have chosen each other not just once but again and again, through every version of the people they’ve both become. It was, without qualification, one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed.

And if I’m being honest with you, it also broke my heart a little.

Certainly not because of the couple or their story, but because of something about me. I have wanted to be married for as long as I can remember. The longing isn’t abstract or recent, it’s old, specific, and persistent. And somewhere along the way, without quite being able to name the moment it happened, the idea of getting married started to feel dimmer. Less like an eventuality and more like a question mark. Something got into me that said you had to be married by a certain moment or season in your life. That grief is real, and standing at the front of a room full of people celebrating love has a way of making it even more real.

I think a lot of us carry something like this into other people’s celebrations. A longing we can’t fully set down. A grief that shows up uninvited in the middle of someone else’s joy. And it doesn’t make us bad people or bad friends. It makes us human.

I keep returning to Siobhan’s phrase: “I love love.” Not “I love my love” or “I love being in love,” but love itself: the thing, the force, the orientation. Love as it shows up in a couple renewing vows after years. Love as it shows up in chosen family. Love as it shows up in the quiet, unglamorous decision to keep showing up for another person when it would be easier to leave.

That kind of love is not diminished by our longing for it. If anything, our longing is evidence of how much we believe in it. You don’t grieve the absence of something you’ve stopped valuing.

So, I’m learning, slowly and imperfectly, to hold both things at once. The ache of wanting something I don’t yet have, and the genuine, full-hearted celebration of love wherever I find it. In couples marrying and renewing their vows. In the rooms where chosen family gathers and love, in all its forms, gets to be exactly what it is.

I love love, too. Even when it’s complicated. Even when love is the only thing left.

What does love look like in your life right now? Is there a form of love you’re grieving or longing for?

Let us pray: God, you are love; not a metaphor but a reality, the ground of everything that is good, true, and lasting. Thank you for the love we witness in others, which teaches us what love can be and do. Hold gently those of us who carry longing alongside our celebrations, who grieve what we don’t yet have even as we rejoice in what others do. Give us the grace to hold both without losing either. And remind us that our longing is not a wound, but a witness, evidence that we still believe love is worth wanting. We ask this in the name of Jesus, who called us to love one another as he has loved us. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] That’s a horribly heteronormative description of getting married or the basics of a wedding, but the only LGBTQIA+ representation in that movie was the wedding planner, Franck, and his assistant, Howard, played by the marvelous Martin Short and BD Wong, respectively. Very secretly, I really wanted to be Franck and marry Howard, but I didn’t know what to do with those feelings yet.

[2] Yes, I was totally oblivious to the fact that the groom wasn’t at all involved in the planning of the wedding.