We’re all looking for lasting love. (Have you ever heard someone say, “I’ll love you until July 6,” or “I’ll love you for the rest of the month”?) We naturally want to stay with the people we love forever. We don’t want the story to end; we want to keep turning the pages to new chapters.

If we don’t want it to last – even when it seems illogical or even impossible – it’s not love.

That’s why our phones are full of photos: we want the good times to last, and we want to be able to go back to them and relive the emotion of the moment. Even when we talk about living in the moment, we mean expressing something lasting, living in love, in every moment we’re in.

But our experiences can be discouraging. Many couples crumble: they seemed strong as rocks, capable of facing any storm together, but then they break up. Chances are someone close to you has gone through that experience. Or maybe you have.

Can love really last forever? If those seemingly perfect couples we just talked about broke up, what hope do the rest of us have?

Okay, hang on. Let’s take a step back. Love can last forever, but that kind of love is outside of our natural strength. We all have an infinite desire to love and be loved, but we know that we’re limited… And other people are too. We’re perfectly aware of our weaknesses (or at least some of them), and we usually have a pretty good handle on the defects of the people we love too. This is a universal experience.

If we want to know how to love forever, we have to go to the one who invented love. We need to go to God. He is love, and He can teach us to love.

And God made us. The infinite desire in your heart is God’s “fault,” and He wouldn’t burden us with the frustration of an infinitely unachievable desire. He gives us the love that quenches our thirst.

Jesus makes eternal love possible. And thousands and thousands of people in every generation testify to it: people who’ve lived with the person they love their whole lives, faithfully, through minor inconveniences and major challenges.

Even today, the world is full of people in love who are going to be able to say that they loved “to the end” at the end of their lives (even if they don’t know it yet). Jesus is the model of loving “to the end.” He became like us in everything but sin, to show us the way to fulfill our desire. That way goes through the Cross.

He is always ready to embrace us with open arms, no matter what happens. He bridges the “unbridgeable gap,” as Fr. Mike Schmitz said in his address at the National Eucharistic Congress in the USA (July 18, 2024).

We do crazy things when we’re in love: we talk on the phone for hours, we go looking for amazing gifts, we stand in the rain just to have a few more minutes together… God did the same things for us. He went to the very end, to the last extreme. The Cross is proof of his infinite love for each of us.

Sometimes we say, “I would die for you.” God didn’t just say it; He did it. He died for us, and He continues to love us.

God’s love is the only infinite love, and it’s solid. It’s a lasting certainty that we can build our lives on. His love gives us the fulness of infinite love.

So how can we love forever, if it’s so far beyond our natural strength? There’s only one practical way: love now, in this moment, and the next one, and the next. We can only love in the present. What are you doing for love right now, today? If you can love one moment after another, one day at a time, you can do it forever.