Love's Truth

I’ve been looking around and working on this site www.43things.com and I really think I like it so far.  Check it out (I referenced it in an earlier post, but my username is: muse71 if you’re interested in reading it).  It’s a place to list your goals, see what others have for goals, share like goals, get support in achieving them, and share your experiences and help others once you’ve achieved them.  I have NO clue what I’m doing, lol but I’m being spontaneous and open.  

So I have 6 things I want to do now.  I forget what all they are, something about drinking more water, make others happy, find love, and something else.  I’ve also done two things, continued to write poetry and built my own webpage (several actually, I do this on the side too ;)

But in my reading at lunchtime of other peoples goals, I was cheering some folks on and came across this post on “finding love”.  Someone else is doing the goal I’m doing, and they posted their story.  This post I’ve copied and pasted for you is someone’s response to the original poster and DAMN it is SO true.  I replied as well and have printed this for my own remembering for my future relationship (and yes, today I have hope that perhaps I will have another long term relationship someday… today anyway  ;)

Here you go:

On: Fall in real love: ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't live without each other love.
Real love, yes...  — 1 week ago
...ridiculous, no. Inconvenient, yes—at the time I thought so. Consuming, sometimes; at times, though, you get caught up in the small stuff of life and take each other for granted for a while. That’s why love takes effort. It takes effort to remember, to remind, to demonstrate, to give, to forgive, to allow for imperfection and encourage and keep on loving.
I read back through all the posts before I wrote this, to see if anyone else had said what I think needs to be said here. one person hinted at it, and that was all.
I’ve been married for nearly 19 years, which is a pretty long time. His folks have been married for over 35 years; mine for nearly 50. His paternal grandparents both died a couple of years ago, still married after more than 55 years. His paternal grandfather is still living; he lost his wife a couple of years ago, also, and misses her every day after more than 55 years. My paternal grandparents were married at age 12 and 17 (this was a long time ago, kids, and even they wouldn’t recommend being so young); they stayed married until Grandpa died in the mid-70s, and their love has lived on beyond him. My maternal grandparents also had a long marriage that lasted until Grandpa’s death.
So I maybe know something about real love, love that lasts. It’s not a lightning bolt. It’s more like a spark that you blow on, work on, and keep on feeding. There’s a fire, sure, but it’ll go out if you just lie in front of it daydreaming about how in love you are.
Sometimes we imagine we’d do anything for love—we’d run through that airport and grab him before he got away, we’d stand up to our disapproving families or move across the country. We cheer movies where someone gives up a great career for a better love, or humbly promises to be a better man if she’ll just take him back.
The tricky thing to do for love is to accept that he’ll always be a stricter parent, that he’ll never remember birthdays, that she’s terminally distracted, that she’s got a crazy mother who she loves. Being a good parenting partner (YOU, not your partner), cheerfully helping him not feel like an idiot on your birthday, keeping track of things for her, loving her mother. Putting your marriage first and everything else second, even the little things, the obvious things, the “how can he not SEE this” kinds of things. Those are the hard things people do for love.
We’ve got four kids and I’m 70 pounds heavier than when he married me. He’s not perfect, either. We’ve had a handful of real arguments; we’ve both swallowed our anger for each other’s sake at times; we’ve put each other first and sometimes second and had to rethink and recommit. We’ve let go of being right in order to be happy, sometimes, both of us.
It’s worth everything. It’s worth EVERYTHING we’ve each given up.
I know I could live without him, because in the next room as I write this is his brother’s widow. She’s just my age (39) and she’s surviving, partly because he and his brothers remember her and take care of her, call the boys to talk to them, stuff like that.
But I wouldn’t want to live without him for a minute.
A long time ago he told me that one of his favorite stories was about a man we both admire, who sat next to his elderly wife on an airplane and asked her, “Dear, what do you think we’ll be doing in 82 million years?” His wife laughed and rolled her eyes, gave him a fond pat, said, “Oh, honey,” in an indulgent tone of voice. And they held hands.