Being in Love

The road to love is paved with unforeseen obstacles, sappy song lyrics, some distressingly deep potholes, and occasionally a set of counterfeit eyebrows.  Allow me to explain.

The first boy who drove me away from the safety and security of my parent’s house alone in an actual car was definitely too old for me.  I knew it, he knew it, and apparently his mother was vehemently convinced of it as well.  She spent enormous mental energy coming up with reasons a fifteen year old girl should not be dating her nineteen year old son.  My favorite (and perhaps her flimsiest) justification is to follow and why he opted to tell me his mother asked him this question, I will never know….   “Tell me dear….why would you want to date a girl who doesn’t have any eyebrows?”

You see, back in the day, I was a redhead.  My springtime pre-freckled skin displayed an impressive pallor the likes of which is otherwise only associated with things like a fresh slice of Wonder bread or maybe a tube of zinc-oxide nosecoat for the beach.  I was practically see-through. My very blonde eyebrows followed suit and though they were indeed present, without the benefit of stadium lighting my young brows were virtually undetectable to the naked eye. 

The eyebrow inquiry was a low blow but it didn’t really matter as our fledgling relationship never made it into my sophomore year of High School.  But you might be pleased to know that before we parted ways, I did seek out the opportunity to walk casually through my boyfriend’s mother’s kitchen wearing a pair of homemade black construction paper eyebrows.

Everyone who breathes has likely suffered the anguish associated with learning to love.  Teenage crushes are painful without interfering mothers and I would soon learn that making peace with my eyebrows was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  There were other boys and lots more drama as I navigated the learning curve associated with broken heartedness. 36 years later it still makes me cringe to reflect.  It is a truism that crying oneself to sleep is an adolescent rite of passage.

After several more trials and errors, I met the boy who would eventually become my husband.  He was a persistent sort and made several futile attempts to find a way to speak with me before he actually mustered the courage to just dial the phone.  Yes, phones still required dialing in 1979. There were references made to our matching hair color (he alleged that he made it a point to meet all the redheads…); there were visits to the dairy bar at which I earned minimum wage and where he ate entirely more ice cream than is advisable for a person of ANY age.  But since it was the late seventies, my clearest memory of these initially fruitless attempts involved a very loud and very jacked up green Pontiac Le Mans.  It was after school and I was on foot with an armload of textbooks; making the not-too-distant trek to my grandparent’s house.  Seizing the day, Jim (two years my senior) cruised up alongside my teenage self in his impressively noisy car.  As if his V8 engine was not purring loudly enough, the Led Zeppelin eight-track tape thumping menacingly from his speakers surely and unforgettably rounded out the soundtrack for our encounter.  My heart rate was pounding in my ears almost as loudly as his speakers.  I was panicked, thrilled, and desperately intrigued. But the spell was broken when this stirringly mysterious boy gave voice to the cheesiest pickup line in the history of the world.  “Hey Babe, wanna get lucky?” 

Somehow despite that unfortunate line, we found ourselves engaged to be married before I even left for college. Again, too young for such things; for heaven’s sake, even HIS cerebral cortex had not yet fully matured.

We were inseparable, going everywhere together and even dressing alike.  Silly songs about bushels and pecks and hugs around the neck were sung. We were disgustingly sentimental, making up ridiculous names for one another.  Worse yet, answering to them….

He was learning to program computers while I was learning to be a nurse.  His school was more than hour away from my school and yet somehow he managed to hold down a fulltime job as well.  He slept almost not at all during those years, faithfully driving back and forth to see me whenever he had the opportunity.  The “house mother” in the lobby of my school would shake her head in disapproval and concern when she’d find him sitting upright yet asleep on the couch waiting for me to finish preening and come downstairs.  “Oh, the poor boy….”  There was a lot of tsk tsk-ing. 

His mother hated it too, as you can imagine.  Though she often expressed worry over his lack of sleep she was more gracious than my former boyfriend’s mother and thankfully never played the “no eyebrows” card to coerce him into healthier patterns. 

Most of Jim’s wardrobe was in the back of his car and since he’d been doing his own laundry for several years, the majority of his clothing was rumpled and a distinct grey hue. I’m sure anyone taking a look inside his parked car would have imagined a homeless person had taken up residence. My devoted fiancé kept himself awake while driving back and forth on the highway with a practiced routine.  This routine included the exercise of changing his clothing while at the wheel…   As a health professional (or truly just any old person with a brain), I advise against this practice. I have tried many times to imagine his procedure.  His preference for manual shift cars conjures an image whereby I can assume the clutch would have made this quite a delicate process.  I’m sure there was loud music associated with his apparel transformations as subwoofers have always been a necessary staple in my husband’s cars. It is rather miraculous he was never pulled over for swerving, in fact astounding that he survived several years of this ritual at all.

Our wedding took place after my college graduation.  After four years, four months and fifteen days of a very sweet relationship, one might think we would have known what we were doing.  One might assume the drama was over. This was not so.

We loved each other, surely.  There was and still is no one I admire more. We knew how to have fun.  We liked many of the same things.  We had similar beliefs and comparable backgrounds.  We rather adored each other and were hard-pressed to imagine there was anyone else in the world better suited for a life partner. 

We did most things right but we were young and naïve when it came to real communication. Though the pastor who married us spoke cursorily about money and duty, there was no premarital counseling class about how to say what you mean and perhaps more importantly, how to listen to what you might not ever want to hear.  

Our time together was almost always wonderful.  But if there was something serious to be deliberated, we pretty much discovered a way to get around discussing it in a beneficial way.  Having uncomfortable conversations was not something either of us enjoyed so we tended to skirt issues that could turn unpleasant for either of us.  Sometimes we used silence and sometimes we used sound.  Neither requires talking. Turning up the volume of the stereo loud enough, one can almost ignore the warning sirens in one’s head.  Sometimes one of us would bake something and we’d companionably eat decadent desserts instead of dealing with what was hard. 

We worked two different shifts.  This was not at all ideal; in fact it was a terrible idea, particularly since my shift was during the night. 

If I was sad, he’d almost always find a way to make me laugh.  We are still great at laughing; in fact it got us into trouble with more than one marriage counselor.  I don’t want to suggest that humor is a bad thing because it isn’t.  It is, in fact, quite wonderful.  But laughter in place of talking about what is important can eventually make things much harder than need be. 

Sometimes we shunted our energies into caring about very worthy causes unrelated to our relationship.  We took in young stray bachelors, feeding, cleaning, and doing laundry for their sorry selves as though we were their parents.  We could skirt an issue with practiced diplomacy, putting all our eggs into our carefully crafted kindred spirit basket.  We were, after all, clearly made for each other.  Heck, we even LOOKED alike. 

Was being vulnerable and talking about things that bothered us really that important?  Apparently it was.  Being a pair who never argued didn’t help our situation.  At least people who scream at one another get things out in the open in a noticeable though sometimes publically embarrassing way.  But we preferred to sweep prickly topics under the rug.  After all, being the good kindred spirits we were, we didn’t like to upset one another. 

So three years in, we welcomed a tiny bald bundle into what appeared to be our idyllic home.  We loved our perfect son to distraction.  We were great at funneling adoration into that little boy yet our marriage continued to unravel in the tiniest and sometimes most imperceptible ways.  When we finally acknowledged there was a problem, we attempted therapy and relocated to another town.  I switched jobs.  We moved into separate bedrooms and even tortured ourselves with mediation because we liked each other entirely too much to involve real lawyers.  Bad choices were made; most of them mine.  Those choices turned into patterns and the patterns soon caused us to feel as though we were irretrievably strapped to the front of a speeding train.  The train’s destination was unclear but the promise of dark tunnels was certain.

After all our practiced sweeping under the rug and several years more of failure to effectively communicate, there was very little left at our house besides a big unfortunate lump under the rug and larger protuberances clogging both of our hearts.  So we did what anyone would do in our situation.  We assumed it was the end.

This is the part of the story where two people have grown so far apart, they decide the only resolution is divorce.  There seemed, in our opinion, not much left to salvage. 

But in a wonderfully unexpected twist, things became clearer when we took a physical step away from each other.  We discovered that the misery of being apart was remarkably more painful than the misery of being together.  This, to me, was miraculous.

With more than a little trepidation that our newfound spell of hope might dissipate, we joined forces and made a real attempt to count ourselves within the small percentage of lost causes who can eventually claim a happy ending.  We bit the bullet and departed for a weeklong crash course in communication.  We went away to a place of very expensive intense marital therapy and make no mistake, it was hell. We took testing to discover our pitfalls.  We learned to sit with our backs against each other and listen without interrupting.  We learned to say what we mean and holy buckets, to truly mean what we say.  We learned to listen to the point of exhaustion and though we did not think we could stand to hear another painful word, we learned to swallow our own retort and tenderly ask each other, “Is there more?”  We learned that there was a whole box of practical things we hadn’t even tried and that all of those tools involved being truthful, being vulnerable, laying all our garbage on the line despite the hurt, and finally learning to hear one another’s deepest pain.

Our bonus, four years later, was a beautiful baby girl.  Our family was complete.  My baby girl is nearing 20 years of age now and there are so many things I want to tell her about finding the right person with whom to share her life.  But from experience, I know that my time of influence has nearly passed.  She’s been watching me for almost two decades and her observations and opinions are essentially formed.  It is a little scary to think that the children we bear are seeing it all.  They take their cues from us, watching us interact with each other on a day to day basis when the basement is flooding, an income is lost, or when the mashed potatoes are cooking over on the stove.  They watch the way we choose to love and the ways we sometimes let frustration override our best intentions about caring for one another.  And so I pray.  I pray for my children and I pray for their someday spouses; something I have done since my children were in utero.

May, 2014. And here is one answer to those prayers - our first official
family photo with my beautiful new daughter-in-law Rebecca. 

 It has been a wild thirty-six year ride and believe it or not, Jim and I are now certain the best is yet to come.  Because we’ve discovered that real storybook endings don’t look at all like pumpkins turning into carriages.  There are no glass slippers and this is an excellent thing since I can barely tolerate a pair of leather pumps.  The romantic excitement of falling in love is in fact a poor cousin to the blessing of waking up every day next to the person who has promised to love you and upon whom you finally realize you can depend for a lifetime.  Sometimes being in love is less about a two page letter from a new admirer and more about a two second look that passes between fifty-something year old partners over a piece of burnt toast.  It is less about sending expensive flowers and more about dancing in the kitchen to a song that only the two of you can hear.

All the poetry in the world can’t measure up to the contentment one discovers on the other side of managing to stay together through the muck.  It does get easier and it definitely gets better. We need to start telling newlyweds to expect the worst because hard times are coming.  If we cared, we would tell them to anticipate that there will be days these handsome young men will not even LIKE their wives, let alone want to spend another minute looking at them. Mistakes will be made and those mistakes will be excruciating.  There will be weeks she will want to toss that annoying guy out on his ear and never look back.  The very mannerisms she found so adorable in those first weeks of dating are the things that take her to the brink of insanity when she faces them every day.

But during those difficult years, if they learn to hear one another and remember the promises they made when they were young and optimistic, their elusive love will return in a new and much more genuine way.  Investing decades in a mutually caring relationship is smarter than investing in any 401K.  Adopting a few basic habits and doing the hard work will pay dividends in trust and constancy because money doesn’t buy happiness, but a little daily effort can buy a truly irreplaceable partner. 

There’s no rocket science here; the tools are simple.  Wake up every day and choose to love your spouse.  If he is being a pain in the neck, has failed to read your mind AGAIN, has forgotten to bring home the milk you asked him to pick up FOUR TIMES and is sitting in front of the television snoring with a snack on his chest, love him anyway.  Ask yourself what you can do that very day to show him you are putting his needs above your own.  It sounds counterintuitive in this age of ME but it is positively the way to loving and being loved.  Because if you’ve done the work the two of you need to do, when he wakes from his ESPN stupor with unsightly cheese dip on his nose, he will be asking himself the same questions.  “Am I putting her needs above my own?”  When he answers that question, there is pretty much nothing that can sabotage the foundation the two of you are building.  It’s messy sometimes but it is worth the sweat.

I’ve always been a fairy tale kind of woman.  I thought I needed the knight on the white horse.  But it turns out knights and noble steeds have nothing on the man I married.  Who knew it could be so fulfilling, FUN even, to fall into the rhythms of aging with someone who loves me?  A person who can tolerate my irrational outbursts, a man who can overlook my favorite sweatpants, who shares decades of wonderful and terrible memories, and who has chosen, after all this time, to be with me.

I’m sure Jim would like for me to clarify that he never fell asleep in the cheese dip.  And from the very fullness of my heart, I would like to say that my construction paper eyebrows and I never imagined we’d have it so good.