For Ron

It is funny how one’s interpretation of love changes over time.  When I was a teenager, love was all consuming, my entire being absorbed in being “in love” with my boyfriend.  If he should forget to call, or not say he loved me or failed to mention my socks, I would fall apart into tears of despair and abandonment.  This would be followed by the highs of him brushing a wisp of hair away from my face and telling me my eyes were pretty or leaving a flower for me on my car after high school.  I would float away on Cloud 9, feeling all of my bi-polar happiness. 

As a 20-something, I was interested in a slightly more esoteric, mature feeling of love; something of substance, a coffee house experience – smoky and slightly Hemingway-esqe, but still a romantic; wanting to be at least a little swept off my feet.  I thought that I had wanted the romance Prince Charming mixed with intelligence of Albert Einstein.  However, when I met my husband, I was still not sure what true, enduring love, felt like.  At 28, I had had all these relationships that had been more of a sprint in the race for love – leaving me winded and out-paced in the marathon that love turns out to be. 

As it turns out, love and it’s endurance now fascinates me.  When I married my husband some 11 plus years ago, I had thought marriage and our love would be a lengthy honeymoon and as my kids like to say, “Nothing but cakes and cuddles”.  Reality would prove me very wrong.  Our first year of marriage was a rude slap in the face.  We had to combine money, share house work and basically live with the other person’s annoyances.  What we found in the midst of our nesting period and all the petty arguments of who should take out the garbage and/or do laundry was that at the base of it, we have a deep and abiding respect and friendship for each other.  We really like each other as people; I have found that to be enormously important years later. 

When I reflect on this love that I have for my husband, I think about falling in love with him the first time.  I thought I could do without him, the independent woman that I was, until we decided that we should take some time away from our budding romance for reasons that seemed reasonable at the time.  When he left my house after we talked about backing off for awhile, I thought I’d go to the gym but instead I collapsed in a heap on my couch after I thought about what we had just decided (I think it was my idea, mind you) and cried until I fell asleep.  I had never done that.  I woke up early the next morning and cried some more before heading off to work.  I didn’t even know why I was crying but I knew then that I was falling in love.  That was only the first leg of the race. 

And now, many years later, I have fallen in love with him so many other times since then that I really can’t recall every time.  This feeling of falling for my husband is usually after a cycle of wondering what I was smoking when I married him and I’m sure of him wondering what had possessed him to ask such a harpy for her hand.  But after such a cycle, I reflect on what makes our marriage endure and at the heart of it is the truest love that I have ever felt for another person other than my children and my parents.  It is the glue that keeps us together, binds us as no legal document ever could.  When we were married, this Shakespearean sonnet was read and I think it speaks volumes of the type of love that lasts:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come: 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

I knew that we were in for the long haul but now with our first decade under our belt and safely onward to the next one, I realize that I am now a cross-country runner in the marathon of love; well seasoned to the long miles we must run together, side by side.  I’m as happy as I could ever be with my husband, my best friend, my mate.  And now I feel our poem is like this one from Elizabeth Jennings:

Tell me where you go
When you look faraway.
I find I am too slow

To catch your mood. I hear
The slow and far-off sea
And waves that beat a shore

That could be trying to
Call us toward our end,
make us hurry through

This little space of dark.
Yet love can stretch it wide.
Each life means so much work

You are my wealth, my pride.
The good side of me, see
That you stay by my side

Two roots of one great tree.

We are two roots of one great tree, we are the pair in a three legged race, holding on to each other for support as we run our marathon together, picking up memories along the way, falling in love with each other over and over.