Fourteen years is kind of a long time. It's enough time for an adorable child to grow into an awkward teenager. It's more than enough time for most people to achieve their undergraduate, master's, and PhD work. It's enough time to drive a car into the ground. And, It's enough time to learn something about marriage. This week is the fourteenth anniversary of my marriage to a wonderful, complicated, opinionated man. In some ways, it's quite surprising that we like each other at all. For a couple, we have very few things in common, at least on the surface level. My husband is a lifetime athlete, a Division 1 baseball player in college, a PE teacher, a coach of multiple sports, and an athletic director. He never met a competition he didn’t want to win, or a game he didn’t want to watch. I however, cannot throw, catch, hit, or dribble a ball in any manner. I never met a game that didn’t put me to sleep. I love reading books, writing, theology, church, and riding horses. He only reads Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, and he has ridden a horse about three times in his life. If you drew a Venn diagram of our interests, the shared part would be very, very small. It would contain a strong mutual attraction and a love for Seinfeld and Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn movies. Kind of a surprising foundation for fourteen years of happy marriage.
There are a few binding principles that help us stick together. We both have a strong work ethic for our careers and support the other person. We share similar morals and ethics, even if we disagree on politics and various religious points. We both treasure our families. We both stand up to our partner when one of us is acting like a jerk, and we both appreciate that fact about each other. I may be less-than-thrilled at the time, but I truly value when my husband calls me on my bad behavior. Maybe it is presumptuous to write about marriage and love after only fourteen years, here are my two cents, for what it's worth.
When our relationship is working well, it is because love is what we DO. It is not some force that acts upon us without our control, like how people say, “I can’t help falling in love…” or “I love you, but I’m not in love with you, and I don’t know how that happened.” Love is not something we possess, that we can lose or misplace, the way I lose my sunglasses or my car keys. I do not want to look at my partner some day and say, “Where did our love go?” Our relationship works the best when love is an ACTION, when it is the way we speak to each other, the way we give each other space or support each other in need, the way we touch each other, the way we joke each other out of a rotten mood, and the way we notice and listen to each other.
A few years into our marriage, I realized that love and commitment is a constant choice, an action that repeats itself moment by moment. Nearly every day, we make decisions to love or not to love. Nearly every day, we decide to continue the loving relationship, or to move away from the object of our affection. Some days, the choice is incredibly easy, when my husband looks so handsome in scruffy working-in-the-yard clothes, learns all the Disney princess’s names for our daughters, and brings me a hot fudge sundae with the hot fudge separate so the ice cream doesn’t melt on the way home. Those days, the choice is obvious. Some days, when he’s late to get home, is cranky about money, is obsessed with problems at his work, or forgets to pick up the toilet paper, the choice is not quite so easy. Each day in a relationship, we have a choice to come closer together or further apart through our actions. We ACT the LOVE that we FEEL; sometimes, we ACT the LOVE that we don’t feel at the moment, because we know we will feel it again soon. Love is something we DO, not something that we have or do not have.
These are bold words, I know, and of course I fall short of them regularly. My life (my relationship with my husband and children, and my own spiritual and emotional well-being) works better when I treat love as a verb, as the thing I do, rather than something I possess. I’m not so great at keeping track of possessions; I lose things all the time and I don’t look for them very carefully. If love is something that I have, then I can also lose it. If love is something that happens to me, that I do not act upon, then it can also leave me. I can fall “out of love”. I can allow myself to be distracted, hold grudges, and make excuses for not acting lovingly. When I think of love as an object, that either acts upon me or one upon which I act, I can lose track of it.
When I think of love as something I do, an action, a choice, I AM the love. That doesn’t mean that I am constantly smiling, happy, and romantic. Many days I’m cranky, tired, and impatient. In those moments, through my anger, I can still choose to love. For the last fourteen years and for many, many more, I choose to love.
***It's important for me to clarify that I absolutely do NOT wish to imply that my marriage is perfect, or to judge a person who has separated from a partner. This is merely my perspective, from within this one particular relationship.**
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