Love, But More Mature

Valentines Day is tomorrow. I actually really, really, really like this holiday even though it's what my oldest brother calls a "Hallmark Holiday." I like that there is an entire day devoted to love. I don't look at it as just a celebration of romantic love either. I choose for Valentines Day to be all encompassing, a day to celebrate whoever you love, and whoever loves you...

...unless they're a creepy stalker or something. Then yeah...no.

And now, a mushy story.

A couple weeks ago I was reading back through the journals I kept during the years the man and I were just starting to get together. I've known him since I was fifteen years old, but I didn't think of him in "that way" at first. When I turned eighteen, he was in the Marines already, stationed over in Bahrain in 2002. I kept bugging his sisters, who were friends of mine, about him. How was he doing? What was going on? (I was worried about him because American troops were now in Afghanistan and I know nothing of geography) They finally got so sick of it that they gave me his email address in October of that year so I could ask him myself. I wrote him, and he wrote me back. And you can figure out the rest.

In May of 2003, he was scheduled to come home on leave and I was a nervous wreck. The more I learned about this guy, the more I felt like he was someone pretty amazing. I knew we were friends, but I doubted he felt more than that for me, so I was an emotional mess trying to figure what I felt for him. A couple weeks before he came home, his sister and I were out shopping and she started to describe the kind of girl her (and some of her family) always pictured him to be with. Someone blonde. A bombshell. Basically she described the exact opposite of everything that I was/am (though I didn't know it then, I definitely had some bombshell assets I could have been playing up. Curse my sheltered childhood!)

In that moment, when she was speaking those words, I felt just like Jane Austen's Emma: "It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that no one must marry Mr. Knightley but herself!" 

When I saw him for the first time that May, I was shaking like a leaf. I was afraid he'd be able to see my feelings all over my face. The honest truth is that I was crazy about him.

The honest truth is that I still am.

As it turns out, he was in love with me too. He told me a few weeks later in June, just before my 19th birthday, in a lovely letter that I still have. That November we got engaged, and the following August, after he got home from his deployment, we got married.

Sometimes I wish we could go back to those early days of marriage, but the truth is that even they weren't easy. Six months after we got married he was deployed again. In fact, we've spent more time apart in this relationship than we have together. And even for all the struggles we have been through, and all the hurt I felt, and all the things that have happened between us, I am still that fluttery, head-over-heels in love with him...but I think it's finally changing.

Half of the problems we've had in our marriage have been because he and I aren't really on the same page. And so begins the struggle of wanting him to see things MY WAY, damn it, because if you saw it MY WAY you'd probably stop acting like such a tool! And I can't tell you how many times I've asked him why he won't just get rid of me. Why do we even bother trying to go on with this charade??

His answer: Because I am committed to you.

I hated that answer so much, I wanted to slap his face every time he said it. "I don't want your commitment, I want your love!" I would say.

Then one day, not that long ago, I grew up and *light bulb* realized that his commitment to me is real love. I have to face the fact that even though he doesn't feel butterflies for me, he stays true to me. He doesn't write me love letters anymore, but almost never denies anything I ask of him. The truth is that expressing almost any emotion is no longer easy for him, but he tells me he loves me every day now because I need to hear it.

I've come to realize the depth of his feeling by the enormity of what he must sacrifice in order to be with me. It would genuinely be easier for him if he could just be solitary. But he chooses to stay true to his commitments he made to me almost ten years ago, even though it's hard and it's sure to get VERY hard here in a few months when we start living together for the first time in four years.

When I said earlier that I think my love is changing, I meant that I'm beginning to realize the value of his love for me, and I am choosing to love him in the same way: because I am committed to him. Not a love based on action and reaction, but one of every day I choose to love you no matter what because I promised to do so before God and 11 people.

I never stopped loving the man. I just love him for real now.

Gee, if that isn't a reason to celebrate tomorrow, I don't know what is...