Remember Love
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This week marked the ten-year anniversary of my relationship with my wife. November 4th, to be precise.
I remember what my love was for her a decade ago, and I remember it now.
Love was play and desire back then. Love now is a complex mixture of pride and momentum.
The truth is love changes. I believe that love, in fact, scales. What worked at the beginning of a relationship won’t work now. Who we loved in the past is unrelated to whom we love now, and we can love exponentially as our self-love evolves. Â
During our personal evolutions, though, we might drift away from our partners. That’s the inherent risk of monogamy: to, over time, grow in wildly different directions while trying to maintain a partnership advancing in a straight line.Â
Jane and I haven’t been straight lines. I grew for years in a different direction. I became someone else: someone I didn’t like, and all the while I knew it. I was too afraid to ask her how she really felt about that version of me, but on occasion I would hint at my personal disapproval. I’d half-hope she would tell me the truth, that I was more burden than I was worth. Lucky for me, she never did.
As my identity and self-confidence crumbled, Jane picked up a piece, and then another, and all at once this love maid had become my savior. She was a predestined saint who had chosen a life of work in the convent of my pain, dispassionately going about her duties as she saw them.Â
Her suffering on my behalf while I was suffering on my own sowed the seeds of potential for our love. When tended to, there is no more fertile soil in a human’s range of experiences than love.
Jane took what was already there for me, this capacity, this desire to love and be loved, and she simply gave it permission to grow. And grow it did.Â
A wise man we knew once told us that when it comes to a relationship, one plus one equals three. He reasoned that the sum of two individuals is not what we work on in a healthy relationship. Taking care of ourselves is important, but that won’t, on its own, keep our relationship strong. It’s when we notice and pay attention to this third party, a mutually dependent party, that relational love can grow. This is the relationship itself. At any snapshot in time, I might be growing, and Jane may not. Jane can grow while I fall lazily still. As individuals we grow in all matters of direction and scope, but our foundations can’t be built by others. They can only be enabled, coaxed into a position of comfort and voluntary participation.
When we both participate, love flourishes.Â
Love is what we nurture together. Love is strengthened or weakened by our both admitting vulnerability, our adhering to honesty and enabling our partner’s truest self to show a little more each day.Â
Jane never forgot to love me. I won’t forget it now.
On Wednesday, in what can’t be described as a normal week, a normal anniversary, a normal time in the history of our lives, we awoke, and we celebrated.Â
Because we didn’t forget love.Â
Win, lose or draw, remember love.
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