19/52 GR Masters: “Do you love me?” Tevye and Golde

True, real, committed love is more than feelings, romance, and passion. While I love all of that, those tend to not have the staying power we all long for: A deep, life-long love based on sacrifice, service, kindness, growing, supporting, and being there through thick and thin, better and worse.

In the play Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, a Russian Jew steeped in tradition, is struggling with accepting his daughter’s modern notion of romance and marrying the one you love. He and his wife, Golde, had a traditional arranged marriage where practicality, not love, was not the primary consideration. Tevye, though, begins to wonder if, after all these years, his wife loves him…?

And from this we get a tremendous, beautiful, and touching example of what REAL love actually is.