Our Short Stories & Supper group kicked off a new season this week with a Maupassant piece chosen by a French colleague.

I couldn't take off my history teacher lens, so it read like a typical 19th century critique of bourgeois manners and values. The story recounts a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter in the years after the Revolution. The young girl (brainwashed by middle-class Society) longs for one grand passion/love that will lead to marriage. The grandmother longs for her youth, when people were smart enough to follow passion/love wherever it led. She warns her granddaughter of the unhappiness that waits for those who expect love and marriage to coincide.

Frankly, our discussion proved more interesting than the story. It's amazing how a group of people can read the same words and come away with wildly opposing interpretations. The one married couple present found the young girl's sweetness and innocent belief in love charming and, yes, true. But several of us agreed that Maupassant wrote the story as a sermon championing the grandmother's viewpoint: Maupassant thought his young girl utterly foolish, and marriage a farce.

We have met five or six times now, as a group, and the discussion has been quite free. This time, however, it felt a little stilted. Perhaps we are afraid to voice our views on love in public. It's a tender topic. Our culture has trained us well, both to hope for the kind of passion that ignites a movie soundtrack, and to scoff at the notion that any such passion exists.

I figure out what I think a day or two after these short story discussions, when incoherent fragments in my brain finally come together. What bothers me about Maupassant is that he doesn't see the foolishness of the grandmother's (and his own?) views. Yes, the young girl is naive and perhaps setting herself up for pain, when she tosses aside the instinct to follow attraction wherever it appears. The grandmother, though, acts just as foolishly when she tosses aside the concept of commitment.

Here's the paradox I see in the marriages I admire: The security of a commitment is what allows a passion to burn beyond its initial, thrilling sparks. When people decide to love, they feel free to burn. So, believing in committing to love may bring pain, yes. But believing in following passion for its own sake may, strangely, make depth and freedom of passion impossible.

The whole picture comes down to a question of self and selflessness. If passion and love are all about me and about a feeling, then why should I not pursue any and every attraction? Find pleasure where I can, and so gratify myself. If passion and love are about mutual discovery, and about creating some mysterious unity of identity, then the idea of chasing a whim becomes inconceivable--the only reason the love came into being is because of this particular person. The passion is for this irreplaceable person, not for passion itself, or to please me.

I John says that we know what love is because Jesus laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for others. I believe this. Love is to seek the Other's highest good. The essence of all true loves--not just the romantic ones--has to be a surrender of self; a total giving, without any reserve. It's a way of life that naturally implies both commitment and pain. And, naturally, we shy away from both commitment and pain. But the more we attempt to protect ourselves, the more we eliminate the possibility of meaningful bonds with others.

Now if I only knew how to put this into practice better...