A reminder to focus on my love.

You know sometimes I’m amazed Justin and I not only made it this far, and are still so in love with each other. We had both come from divorced parents and I especially didn’t have very many healthy relationship models. Neither one of us really knew what love was or what marriage took to succeed. But we did know we didn’t want to put our child(ren) through the pain we experienced as children.

A few of our single friends have asked us in the past how we did it: how we found “the right one”, how we made things work and how in the world we stayed so passionate for each other. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past few weeks, trying to understand our own romantic journey and discovery, or self-discovery really, trying to find our own “keys to marital success”.

The journey is different for everyone, I’m sure, but here are the things that made the difference for us:

• Letting go of our type: I was The Bagel Girl and Justin was a construction runner at the time; we both had daily stops at a tool warehouse in town. He spotted me and worked on intuition. My first impression of Justin was “not my type” (based on my type until that point, I can now see that was a good sign), and although he didn’t say so, I wasn’t exactly his either. Justin was accustomed to thoughtless, high school girls; I was accustomed to assholes. So when I started talking philosophy and theology on our first date, he knew I wasn’t the standard cookie-cutter girl. Likewise when I watched him turn his truck’s system down (yeah, he was one of those guys with extremely large and loud speaker systems in his truck) upon entering a residential area, I was literally shocked. Neither of us would have been able to get to that point of noticing these new and interesting qualities had we not stepped outside what we thought we knew about “the perfect date”.
• Letting go of the fairy tale: A very well-meaning woman had once told me, as I was sobbing over a broken heart, that “if it was meant to be it wouldn’t be so hard”. I loved her to death but something about those words didn’t sit right with me. For all of our lives, we’re read fairy tales and “happily ever after” stories. But love doesn’t always come in and sweep us off our feet, carrying us away to Perfect Marriage Land – especially when you’re entering into the relationship with so much baggage. Justin and I went into our relationship knowing that we were in love and that we would have a lot of work to do to figure out how exactly we should put that into action. The first two years of our relationship and several periods throughout were fucking hard. There were moments no one thought we would (or should) make it through. But because we accepted in advance that it wouldn’t always come easily, we didn’t let the worst of times tear us apart. We kept pushing through it, focusing on what we wanted with each other and building our partnership skills along the way. I can’t imagine where we’d be if we had given up.
• Remembering it’s not 50/50. This one came from my Grandma (who has been happily married since 1954) and is probably the greatest key to our success. I had asked her several months before our wedding what her best advice would be and she was quite adamant that a good relationship is never 50/50. It’s closer to 80/20…you just have to be willing to give more than you take. This one challenged me at the time, but she insisted that marriage needs to move from a place of generosity. She explained what I now know to be true in regards to marriage or parenting: unconditional love and endless generosity do not create selfish people who walk over you; it creates an environment of kindness and compassion. It fills people up until they have no choice but to pour it back into those around them.
• Never letting myself go. This one also came from my grandma as well and seriously rubbed up against my feminist mind. After all, shouldn’t Justin love me regardless of whether I wear makeup or gain weight? The answer is yes. But letting yourself go has more to do with Who You Are than what you look like. Justin fell in love with me because I was determined, strong-willed and cared deeply about myself; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. If I “let myself go” – stopped learning and fighting for what I believe in, sat on the couch eating junk food in my pajamas watching trash TV, stopped being the best person I could be…if I let go of my role in our partnership and did a 180 on my personality, he was obviously going to feel differently. He fell in love with me for Who I Am, for my best qualities and for my desire to impress him with those qualities as I did when we first dated. And he’ll miss that person if she leaves just because “we’re married now.”
• Filling each other’s voids. I used to feel resentful anytime I felt I was “mothering” Justin. Likewise I felt uncomfortable admitting that I needed him to care for me the same way. But recently we’ve come to see the amazing healing power and stronger connection that can be had when we symbolically “parent” each other. I believe we marry the person who can love us the way we’ve never been loved and our gift of understanding, kindness and generosity has the power to fill voids we’ve been aching to fill. Together we can right the wrongs of one another’s pasts, giving each other what we may not have had enough of and sheltering one another just as a loving parent unconditionally and automatically shelters their child.

There are a myriad of other things I feel contributed to our success: being open and honest but knowing when honesty would be more hurtful than helpful, understanding our first role is as Zeb’s parents but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to neglect our needs as lovers, being silly together and that sometimes we need reminders of it all.

I’m glad to have written these things out; I love when messages like these come through me, as well as to me. The past few weeks have given us new challenges as we navigate this life and our unjobbing experiences and it’s good to be reminded of these principles of mindfully choosing unconditional love, generosity and compassion.

What about you? What have you learned about love?