How I Quilt

I don’t pretend to know what love is for everyone, or HOW a ‘relationship’ should go. Everyone’s different. I know what it is for me. I know I didn’t marry him because he was perfect. It is more likely that I’m attracted to the imperfect…the one with the ‘broken wing’…rough around the edges. I have a superpower of seeing the ‘heart’ of a person…what really makes them tick; their REAL side that they don’t show to the outside world. I often stand in amazement and watch him genuinely care about another person. I watch him hurt when people are struggling. And I wait, because I KNOW he will be anxious to share these feelings with me. He knows I will understand these things like no one else does, or would even understand. This side of him makes those rough edges not so apparent to me. That’s what a relationship is. The person someone wants to run to when they have news, heartache, or a jarred memory. It is your soft spot to land where you know you will be understood and welcomed. It’s the place that only the two of you can understand. One statement about marriage I read was: Why is it important for people to get married? Because we need a witness to our lives. There are a billion people on the planet. In a marriage you promise to care about this person’s everything. You’re saying “Your life will not go unnoticed, because I will notice it”. It is that patchwork of memories that you can pull up in a minute…that recollection of memories past. It can be as mundane as the day-to-day events, or as spectacular as the planned trips and holidays. These are all weaving who you are as a couple. It is understanding their weaknesses and strengths. It is giving that ‘last bite’ (which we know as the BEST bite) to the other person because you KNOW how much they will like it. It is not always the ‘take your breath away moments’ that young love relates to in its fairy tale. This is when you know that marriage is about the history and familiarity, and the people that are effected because of those memories. You see, anyone can have a lover, but true love is the stitching together of days, years, events, tragedies, raising of children, letting go, and hanging on. Anything else is fantasy. I have read article after article of couples that have been together for years, decades, and they NEVER say what keeps them together as being passion and fiery lust. It isn’t those sexy nights that are often too infrequent because there’s a kid in your bed with a tummy ache or a phone ringing in the middle of the night from a teenager ‘checking-in’. It is ALWAYS because they genuinely cared about the other person’s needs before their own. They ‘like’ the person for who they really are. LIKED!!! You see, that is important when the first person you see at night is the same person you see each morning. ‘I like you’ means ‘I relate to you so much and I like who you are’. It means “I have been watching you year after year and I still want you in my life’. It means you know their faults and weaknesses and you would still be their friend, even if you weren’t married. There is no better feeling in the world than when we can tell what the other person is thinking with just a ‘look’. That something that only the two of us ‘gets’. As Rocky said, “ I got gaps. You got gaps. We fill each other’s gaps”. I know that if my husband ever wanted to leave, then I would have to go with him. It might not be perfect, but it is who we are and quite frankly, I think we are doing a pretty darn good job of being ‘US’. We are here because we know there isn’t any other place quite like OUR place. Happy anniversary…