About ten years ago now, I sat on the my basement stairs alone after having put my girls down to bed. My younger sister, who had very recently met the man who would later be her husband, was calling me from thousands of miles away in a virtual panic. I’m pretty sure it went mostly like this:
“He told me he loves me!” she lamented.
“So?” said I.
“SO!! I didn’t say it back, because I don’t love him, and I’m not going to say it unless I mean it.”
“Well, good for you. Wait, how do you know you don’t love him?”
“Because...because we just met like a month ago. What the world? You can’t love a person in a month. He’s really nice, and he’s taken me on some great day trips, but I don’t love him.”
“Maybe you could love him, right? I mean, give it some more time.”
“I don’t want to drag it out. There’s no fireworks... no intensity. That pretty much means there’s no future, right?”
The irony of the fact that she was asking a divorced single mom of two for relationship/love advice was palpable. After all, my husband of 7 years had walked out on me and our daughters a few short months earlier. In fact, I didn’t even know where he was living at the time.
“I don’t know. I’m probably not the right person to ask. I’m all about the fireworks, but then again none of my relationships have ever amounted to anything but pain.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ve only ever had fireworks at first, and I never wasted time with guys who didn’t inspire those, but obviously that hasn’t worked out very well for me. I mean, if you start the relationship with the most intense feelings you can imagine, where do you have to go from there but down? It’s kind of hard to improve on amazing. What if... What if the relationships that last start with friendship, then a few sparks, a flame, and then the fireworks? What if you could work to ensure that the fireworks moments - the deepest emotional (if not physical) intensity - happened in the years down the road?”
I was pretty much just thinking out loud, but I told her not to give up on him because of a lack of initial intensity. The ability of two people to choose to love one another with their actions even if that person doesn’t inspire sleepless nights, sweaty palms, and butterflies initially is perhaps one of the most beautiful things of which humanity is capable.
I am pretty much in love with the movie Picture Bride on Netflix. It’s about a trend that happened in the early 1900’s in which Japanese men immigrated to Hawaii to work in the sugar cane fields. Many of these men wanted to marry Japanese brides. So they would send a photo of themselves to a matchmaker in Japan who would match them with a girl who was eligible and willing to move to Hawaii. It’s a touching story of a woman who married a man who had unintentionally represented himself to be a younger man (by sending the only photo he had of himself - which had been taken about 15 years earlier). She had initially been disgusted by him, and, despite his attempts to win her over, she remained determined to return to Japan as soon as she was able to save enough money of her own. It’s based on a true story, and it’s truly touching to see how he sacrifices to win her love, and then how she ends up sacrificing her own identity in the end in order to begin to return his love. Watch it. That is all.
My sister called me back a couple of months after her first panicked call. She said excitedly, “I love him! I really do! He asked me to marry him, and I’m going to do it!” I’m sure she could tell you stories of how their love has grown and changed, but I can tell you that I had to take a big dose of my own advice about two years later. I was seriously crushing on a man from Springfield. He was handsome, and he loved God. We had these deep, intense conversations that went on for hours. By contrast, although I thought Mark was tall and cute... I couldn’t talk to him for anything on the phone. He was so quiet and reserved, and yet he pursued talking to me relentlessly, and I avoided his calls for months. I hoped Mr. Fireworks would work out, but relationships like that burn hot and fast, and it did. My parents, all the while, encouraged me to give Mark a chance. I dreaded his phone calls more often than not, because he was too good... too nice... too quiet... to be passionate enough for this notorious romantic - or so I thought.
I remembered that advice I had given my sister years previous. I decided it was time to take my own advice, and, when he asked if we could meet just once to see if it would go anywhere, I agreed to meet. I’ve told the story of our first date in previous blogs. So I won’t rehash that sweet night. It also started out pretty lame but picked up speed and, within about 5 weeks of our first meeting, we were engaged.
Honestly, when we got engaged it wasn’t particularly romantic. It was practical. In fact, instead of a true proposal, Mark’s way of asking me to marry him was to tell me not to take a job that I had recently been offered because he wanted me to come work for him.
“Work for you?” I had asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means, you want to keep staying home with your girls. Austin needs a mom. I need a wife. We both love God. I think we should just get married.”
Not the most romantic proposal for this girl, but we decided that, given our situation as single parents, we needed practicality way more than we needed desperate, passionate, feverish love. (I’m not sure how we could have developed that in 5 weeks anyway.) We discussed whether or not moving across states to marry was feasible for either of us. We discussed that divorce would never be an option for us, because of the fact that our children needed to be able to be stable. We discussed what kind of work I would do, and what school the kids would attend. We discussed waiting until we were married to start our physical marriage. We didn’t have time for fireworks. Ours was *gasp* a marriage of convenience. We were becoming great friends and dedicated partners in raising our children. We shared an uncommon amount of like interests, but we were certainly not deluded into thinking that our love would conquer all. I imagine we had both experienced much more intense feelings throughout our lifetime than the love we felt for one another when we got engaged. However, we agreed at the outset that the order of our priorities would be God, our marriage, our children, and others, and God shoved us through that door. I cannot imagine ever being more overwhelmed or grateful for anything more than I am for that.
We will have been married eight years this coming April. That is not a long time. However, I can tell you that today I am on fire for my husband. He is amazing. He is respectable. He is strong. He carries the load of responsibility that comes with our large family with dignity and integrity. We search for one another’s eyes across crowded rooms. We hold hands for no reason at all. We text. We call. We kiss... a lot. We laugh... all the time. I have never had the kind of fireworks that have developed with my husband since we said, “I do.” There have been plenty of trying times, but we have weathered them by God’s grace.
So many singles look for “The One” that inspires goosebumps... the one with whom they seem immediately compatible and whom they “love” at first sight. I think these unrealistic expectations lead to a lot of people overlooking a forever companion who is right under his/her nose. I maintain my belief that the best of marriages come from being the best of friends. The fireworks come along in due time, and they are the kind that last forever. Marry your friend... your companion... your helper... your buddy, and you might just fall in love.
