Learn To Love

This song is about the battle we fight when we choose to commit to someone for a lifetime. It seems to be what someone might say to their lover, or the message between two lovers about their promise of devotion, even though the world will try to tear them apart. It acknowledges how difficult it is for marriages, friendships, or relationships in general to last in this kind of world and at this time when the fires of greed, selfishness, envy and anger are growing and are out to destroy people and the bonds between them.

Maybe we need to understand how painful it is to be brokenhearted before we understand how valuable this kind of love truly is. “I need the fear of a love that’s lost” implies that a fear of lost love might make someone work even harder at maintaining it.

“The fires we didn’t start” just refers to the nature of this world, this culture, of leaving a relationship when we’re not satisfied. What the chorus seems to mean is that no one is able to withstand the heat of these fires until they know what they’ll be missing if they get burned. Personally, the line “Just hold on to the way it is tonight,”makes me think that maybe this is the promise someone might make during, perhaps, their wedding. On the wedding day, the bride and groom are going to feel like the marriage will last forever and like they can be strong the whole way through. Inevitably, there will be days and seasons when they want to be through with it, but if they could just maintain the zeal they had for each other on their wedding day to keep going and stay strong, it can last. To “learn to love in the darkness and the light” simply means learning to love in the good times, and also in the bad.

“I had the fortune of a second chance...” I think everyone has a purpose in life and a path to follow. We sometimes stray, and sometimes we’re given second chances to get back on the road that leads to where we were always supposed to go, for example, to find this person. “The reason we all should dance”? I think it’s true joy, and it seems this song communicates that we can’t achieve true joy unless we persevere under the trials of life and the trials that will come when we decide to commit to someone forever.

Loving in good times is one of the easiest things to do; but loving when everything goes wrong is the greatest hardship we will ever face in this life. And that is why we need to train, prepare, and learn to love.