Love is... Marriage

Sometimes it's the little things, the quiet moments. The sigh of contentment after a long day when you finally have nothing to do but sit. The look on his face when I come in the door after work. The noise he makes when I scratch his back without being asked. The time we get to sit and talk over coffee. We don't have a dramatic romance. We just have each other, and it's good. Silly little things that add up to a lot. The places we mesh that drive the ways we're different into some more powerful action than we could ever manage on our own. I push too much and I'm too scattered. He reminds me to slow down, not take on too much, and when I need him he's a rock even when he would like to be able to fall apart himself.

Marriage isn't a great mystery. It's supporting one another in goals and dreams. Setting them up together, not about giving up your own self, but about making it something bigger then just one self. I can remember a time I tried to kill my self. Read that carefully - I was trying to subsume my own hopes and dreams. To be less. I thought if I could die to self, it would cure the fissures that ran through that relationship like yawning abysses under my feet, waiting for an unwary step to swallow me whole. The cracks moved on the face of the earth, until I never knew what misstep would be my last. I became afraid to do anything at all.

And now I can fly. I have freedom, and it's because of that I can choose to come home tired and cook dinner and fall down to sleep next to him and in the night he's warm and secure if I have a bad dream. I can work until I can't see straight and know that it's ok. I'm doing my best and it's enough for him. I don't have to live in fear that it's never enough. Because there are people for whom it is never enough, until you have used up the last drop of your self and poured it out in vain hoping it will appease them. There are others who fill you up, but not at their own expense. It defies the laws of physics. One and one are more than two.

Don't settle for less. Don't accept that you will never be good enough, because you are enough as you are. Love will make you want to be better, not feel like you should be ashamed of yourself. Sacrifice doesn't feel like wrenching your still-beating heart out of your chest and handing it to them only to watch them crush it in the mud. It feels like partnership, like being in a tandem yoke and pulling in harmony. It feels like marriage.