Marianne, how do you?

The first time I was identified with Marianne Dashwood was in junior high. When my three current roommates and I were assigning Jane Austen characters for each of our personalities, myself as Marianne was once again a unanimous consensus. Reading Sense and Sensibility for my Jane Austen class, I realized again how much, really, I resemble the, shall we say, impetuous? heroine. At the beginning of the novel, Marianne insists that you can love only once, that anything after that is false, inadequate, even betrayal. At the end, as we all know, she seems to rescind this maxim when she marries the Colonel. Countless critics have questioned this, some even saying that it is a flaw in the story, that Austen in doing this shows a broken Marianne.
I was discussing the idea of love with a friend, and surfaced the age-old question "So, are you over him?" So yes, Marianne, what happens when you've *been in love?* How do you "get over" that? As far as I can tell, the answer is: you don't. (I realize I may be treading on thin ice here; in fact, it may be more definite than possibility.) But you can't ever retract real love, because love is loyalty, fidelity, commitment, decision. When that commitment is betrayed, you don't ever simply "get over" it. It affects you always; it is irretractably part of the past. What happens, then? How does Marianne accept Colonel Brandon after Willoughby? One answer that I will present is that love comes in different forms. You accept reality, accept, perhaps, poor judgment and rashness, and accept that the commitment has been broken. Perhaps, even, certain types of love become understandable only in the aftermath of heartache. In my case, it dawned on me at some point that God wanted far more for me than I had wanted for myself. After all my protestations made in pain, "thank God the joke's on me."
Largely, it is up to us. We must be willing not to "get over it," not negate the love and betrayal and pain, but be willing to be healed, to stop being controlled by memory and what exists only in the past, and not in the moment. What is Now is new, and healing, and joy. I fall back on St. Teresa of Avila, such a glorious, amazing mystic: "It is a terrible thing to doubt that God can work in ways far beyond our understanding." So, in the spirit of Lent, I adjure all to accept Love.
And read Eliot.