12 year anniversary: Thoughts on a Seinfeld type of marriage

On my 12th anniversary, I can’t help but think of the things I’ve learned in the last 12 years of holy matrimony.  A friend once told me that you don’t understand love until you’ve been married for twenty years.  I believe it, because I sure understand love differently after twelve years.  I wonder what’s in store for the rest of our lives.

So, I’m trying to write about our 12 years of marriage and enduring love.  I like to write and I usually have plenty to say, but this time I got nothing.  My husband’s answer to the question, “What do you think about twelve years of marriage?”  “It’s been good.”  He is a man of few words.  Then, it occurred to me, our marriage happens when not much happens.  We are the Seinfeld of marriages; you know, the show about nothing, right?  Our love shows most strongly when it is seems like nothing is happening at all.

There might have been moments of great drama between M. and myself, maybe.  Maybe there was loss, betrayal, forgiveness, rediscovery, passion and all those great emotions that fuel great romantic plots.  Maybe...  But whether there was or was not, those moments of breathtaking drama are not where our love lies.  Our love lies in the every day, the constant support, the patient listening, the self-deprecating humor, the plain old enjoying of our life together.  THAT is our “show about nothing” and, like Seinfeld, the genius is in the subtle details.

I love my husband when he tells me that my new bathing suit makes me look like a powerlifter and he loves me when I punch him and laugh when he says it.  I love him when he won’t let me leave my shampoo in his newly remodelled shower, so he buys me a shower caddy to carry my bottles.  He loves me enough to finally install shelves in the shower so I can quit bitching about the shower caddy.  I love him enough to get up during the night when the kids are awake.  He loves me enough to get up with them at 5:00 am when I just need an hour more of sleep to face my day.  I love him when he drives me crazy turning the house upside down looking for the keys to the truck.  He loves me when he finds the keys that I left in the on position in the ignition of our truck, which results in a dead battery while the truck is stuck in the mud.  He loves me enough to try riding a horse and I love him enough to try to play golf  (By the way, he is a much better rider than I am a golfer, but that ain’t sayin’ much.).  I could go on and on, but I think you get my point.

We prefer to show our love with humor.  Neither of us is comfortable with grand gestures and romantic words.  Both of us value every day fidelity more than dramatic declarations. Our love is in the day to day rhythm of our life and the way we fill in for each other’s needs.  I know he needs me to proofread his writing.  He knows I’m a terrible cook, so if he wants a dinner he can enjoy, he might as well cook it.  He knows I need to ride my horse; I know he needs to golf, and we make both of those happen for each other.  

This sounds quite unromantic, I know. But love and romance do not necessarily go together, as a matter of fact, some people believe that true love cannot grow until romance is dead.  That long-lasting, real love cannot grow until we truly see the other person, not what we hope them to be or what they seem to be, but truly who they are, warts and all.  That the day you look at a person in moments of selfishness, crisis, brokenness and you choose to love them still, is the day that real love begins.  That when you put the needs of that person, who you see truly, in front of your own is a moment of true love.  This is not romantic.  We don’t see it in the movies or the books, because it’s pretty boring and unremarkable.  The moments after the “happy-ever-after”, when the dishes need to be washed and the lawn needs to be mowed and neither of you have slept through the night in months, those are the moments when love is truly tested.

Ours is a love with deep roots and lots of space to grow.  We have loved each other through changes in careers, deaths of loved ones, self-doubt and anxiety, fertility treatments, pregnancies, and the parenting of two small children. If there were dramatic moments in our life, they broke open our hearts a little more for each other.  Then, every day after that, we filled in the cracks of each other’s heart with a little more love.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like our love is about much at all, but we know it is about everything.