my love

“Love is not just something that happens to you…it is a certain special way of being alive.  Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life…,” Thomas Merton

Ten years ago today I married my beloved.  The picture above is us walking together to the chapel.

I fell in love with him for a hundred reasons.  For the way he could so easily converse with every check-out clerk in a grocery store, really seeing and appreciating each one.  For his hearty laugh.  For how he’d leave flowers outside my dorm room stuck in Snapple bottles.  And most of all, for accepting and loving the parts of me that often go unseen.  The messy parts.

I still love those things today.

And, eight homes, two golden retrievers, and one babe later, our love continues to deepen and change.  I think I have to say it’s ripening.  We have weathered a cross-country love affair, friends divorcing, and the launch of my business.  We have decided that we aren’t the two people we thought we were marrying ten years ago; he’s more Mr. MBA and I’m more hippy feminist than he ever dreamed.

We have indeed changed.  Life is about growing and evolving, isn’t it?

And the love between us has changed as well. 

It has invited us to partake in so many lessons.  Lessons in being flexible.  Being vulnerable.  In co-creating, whether a home or a meal or a budget.  Lessons in listening even when we might not understand or agree. In learning together how to parent our sensitive, strong-willed boy.  Lessons in expressing ourselves with truth and kindness.  In risking being wrong and in forgiving. 

Every day we are still learning how to support one another to become who we are meant to be.  To love despite and because of it all.  And to keep going back to that ceremony and saying yes all over again. 

Our love has deepened in so many ways.  It’s more weathered now.  And oh so rich.

If I were to write a list of what I love about this man today, my list includes these thing:  I love that he still snuggles with me.  That he cooks dinner nearly every night.  That he hugs me as if we were still teenagers.  That—I swear!—he can do just about anything, from learning how to lay hardwood floors (he read a book, I tell you!) to winning his Fantasy Football league.  Most of all, I love that he holds space for me to become even more fully the woman I want to be.

I wish for us so many more moments in the years to come…more loving, another babe, exploring together, loads more laughter, vacations, abundance.  And even more ripening and—dare I say it?—change.  I wish for us comfort and joy and stretching and becoming even more of ourselves…and finding deep comfort in living the journey together.

Here’s to another ten, my love.