Sweets for My Sweet

Happy Valentine's Day!

I was writing in my journal this morning and thinking about what it means to love. I was thinking especially of what it has meant in my marriage, in my relationship with Justin these last years. My breath catches when I consider how truly and deeply privileged I am to have the heart of such a man.

Things have not always been pretty between us. Our relationship began as a long distance affair. While you can argue both the benefits and detriments of such an arrangement, we were eager to be in the same town and eventually just decided that it made more sense to move in together. Aside from the normal challenges of adjusting to cohabitation, very shortly after we moved in together, at the age of twenty-four, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Let me just tell you- THAT will throw a wrench in a new relationship! Between treatments and side-effects, we were still trying to figure out what we were to one another, whether this person was "the one," and how to face looming mortality in the midst of our immortal twenties. There were some ugly times in there. Times when we weren't the partner that the other needed, that we hurt or disappointed or failed one another. But we kept coming back to this underlying truth: we loved one another. Through thick and thin, the love was there, even while we were still learning how to do it well.

At our wedding, we chose to do several things that were meaningful to us. One of them was, while we wanted to include the traditional vows, we also wanted to make some promises that would be more applicable to daily living, to the partnership that over the 5+ years we've been together, we've nurtured into something miraculous. So we came up with seven promises that we felt would keep us both healthy, happy, and in love. They ranged from promising to remember who we are as individuals and to do the work required to maintain a good relationship with ourselves, to making quality time together a priority even when it may mean sacrificing other activities that are important to us, to demonstrating our love each day through touch and affection. Even just the simple act of deciding on each promise brought us closer. We work toward fulfilling those promises every single day.

We also chose our reading very carefully. While there are so many gorgeous bits of both poetry and prose floating in the world of love, we chose to read an excerpt from Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I know it's not sexy, but we wanted something real to us. Something that said we would make it, that we would survive the tough times. The excerpt was a story about a man who approached Covey after a conference where he'd spoken about being proactive. The man said that he believed what Covey had said, but that it just didn't apply to all situations, specifically his own- he and his wife just weren't in love anymore. They'd tried a few things, but the love just wasn't there. He was concerned for their children, but just didn't see a way to feel in love agin. Covey told the man to love his wife. The man argued that they weren't in love anymore. Covey again told him to love her. The man, frustrated, asks how you can love someone you don't love. And Covey replies that love is a verb, that love-the feeling- is a fruit of love, the verb. He says that love is something you do- it is the sacrifices you make, the giving of self- that love is a value that is actualized though loving actions. And if you can be proactive and love (the verb), then love (the feeling) can be recaptured. Again- I know it's not sexy, but both of us just connected to this concept of choice, of actions defining our love.

My husband loves me every single day. I feel it in the coffee he preps and sets the timer for so I have a warm cup waiting for me when I wake up. I feel it in his willingness to run out and start my car or scrape my windshield when it's freezing outside just to spare me the moment of discomfort. I feel it when he looks at me. I feel it when he patiently rolls over and goes back to sleep without complaint when my snooze alarm rings for the 11th time at 5am (every. single. day.). I feel it when he calls me on his way home from a 13 hour shift at the hospital to let me know he's on his way and to see if I need him to pick anything up along the way. I feel it when he sits me down and says- don't defer your dreams, Cindy, I will pick up extra shifts to make the bills- you go grab that camera of yours and seek this thing that calls you.