I'm in love.
I don't know how many people are looking at close to 9 years with another human being and say that with great frequency...but I am. I know that those first few month, I wore my newly minted "in love" status on my face... the bounce that new love brings. A few months down the line and for many, it fades...maybe into something slightly business like... you shift from " I'm in love" to "I'm in a relationship". So official!!! Then, you start the process of the contract... I'm engaged.... I'm getting married... I'm the bride.... I'm the groom.....I'm married. And then, you stalemate at "Married" for a while. Six or seven years go by and the enormity of it all settles in...thoughts of scratching the seven-year-itch and you face that you are just young enough to try to get out and move on with your life, but by this time next year, that won't be true anymore. I've watched this pattern time and time again...I've heard the words of others and even wondered if there was something I missed, because I am still in love.
The interesting thing is that there is nothing that is outstandingly lovable ( by conventional standards) about either my husband or myself. We are both a bit thicker than standard definitions of beauty imply ( okay...alright... we are fat. we are fatties....happy now?). We both came readily prepared with enough baggage to fill a corner in a name-brand overstock discount store. We are flawed, a little hopeless, kinda fucked up...and completely in love.
So, what makes our love story different? Well, there are some who might say that we both lowered our standards enough to be realistic. I would argue that we both changed the standard for ourselves and realized that love is realistic for each of us. Nether of us shy away from the work...and it is work. There is no lack of emotion in either of us (this is especially true of my husband, who's emotion resides right under his skin,while mine is a little deeper buried, but not too hard to find, especially if the scratch is deep enough).
In the end, though, the bigger truth is that we are each other's best friend. That sounds trite... the title of a chapter in a book called something incredibly lame like " Rediscovering the Love in Your Marriage"... but trite does not always mean untrue. He knows me better than anyone else on the planet...much better than my parents...better than any other friend.... better than I know myself most times. A friend is someone who you feel safe occupying the same space with, and a best friend is someone that you not only feel safe with, but prefer. That defines how I feel about my husband. There aren't many places I would prefer to be than at home with my husband and my kid, and even places that might rank higher ( a vacation at the beach would be nice) would only be preferable if he was there with me. There have been nights where I feel my age...out at a bar with friends and I feel the urge to go home, where the music isn't so loud and I'm not required to binding clothing, and I start dreaming about my PJ's, my bed, my husband and a podcast. It doesn't take me long to walk into our bedroom and feel the relief of being back where I am happiest. That might actually be my favorite place on the planet.
None of that sounds particularly romantic... but when you have loved someone as long as I have loved my husband ( and as deeply as I have loved my husband), you start to understand romance as something different. Sure, there are times I think about beautiful romantic gestures...flower... dinner... a reason to get dressed up and feel sexy ( and this post is not meant to discourage those things.... really.... David... you heard that, right?)... but the truth of romance is that it is a gateway to a home.
When we leave "the nest" of our parents home and venture out into the world, looking for another person, we find ourselves a little homeless. We have apartments and condos and furniture and all of the makings of a home, but it's not really a home. We are nomads, and we search for a home by way of relationships. In him, I found my home, and it really is the place I am happiest in.
Now, it's not always sunshine and rainbows...we have times that are not that great. We have times that are downright shitty. The interesting part of those times is that they are usually earmarked by the fact that one or both of us has lost sight of the other person's place in our lives. We shut them out or shut them down... we try to take on the world ourselves and don't let the other one come along for the ride. We stop asking our best friend to take part in our lives. This can happen slowly... where we let days on mindless activity slip by without really talking to each other about what is going on, or quickly, where we start handling something big without involving the other person. But either way, we jump on different tracks.... and soon, those tracks are nowhere near each other.
So, what is the great part about my relationship? The moment that one of us realizes we are too far away, we shift gears and immediately start our way back to the other person. We realize we are missing that person- the one standing right in front of us- and that them not being right there with us is exactly what is missing.
The moments we are most in love is actually when there is a problem and we are both in it together. Those are really great moments. The kid is having problems, or work is kinda shitty, and we are in it together as a team. One or both of us can be completely losing it, but we are there together... and the sting of the crappy thing still exists... but there is a relief in the form of feeling great about being in love. My husband and I have both handled the weight of a shitty experience with one hand, and the gravity-defying lift of being in-love with the other. It's slightly insane to say that you have been at your happiest when you where in the fox-hole...but if you are there with someone you love... the fox-hole ends up being a perfectly acceptable home.
The thing about being in love is that it's never going to be those first few moments again...and some people mistake the lack of butterflies in their tummies or face-aching grins across their face for falling out of love. Their error is forgetting why they looked for to begin with. That feeling, the one you get in a new relationship... it's not love, it's nerves. It's the anxiety that comes with letting a new person into your life. It's the physical response your body has in knowing that this could be the end of facing life alone. It is the excitement that your nomadic life could be a thing of the past and you might actually have the opportunity for a home right around the corner.
Last night, I went out to Starbucks to catch up on some work, then came home to my husband working on homework with my daughter. I ate the eclair he had brought home for me ( hey, I admitted we were fatties!) and he beamed as he talked about making dippy eggs for the first time ever. We had a completely boring conversation about how I make her dippy eggs, and we feel asleep listening to a podcast... both of us warm in the thought that we got to fall asleep next to the person we trusted most in the whole world. It's not fancy...it's not traditionally romantic...and most 20-somethings would roll their eyes at the boring, suburban-minivan-mediocrity of it all....and what they don't know ( and perhaps we didn't know) is that it's exactly what we were both looking for 9 years ago.
And,if I'm really lucky, I'll get the chance to do it all again tonight.
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