Being in Love
Should I go the Woody Allen route and announce that “Love is too weak a word for what I feel — I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F’s, yes I have to invent, of course I do, don’t you think I do?” Maybe the sappy (and incorrect) “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” from Love Story? Or perhaps echo the old stand by Pride and Predjudice with the gloriously unrealistic Mr. Darcy’s startling proclamation that Elizabeth has “bewitched him body and soul” and he loves her. Books and movies seem to focus entirely too much time on the falling in love and not enough just on the BEING in love, you know? But love isn’t just about the falling; in fact… I dare say that’s not even the best part. The best part comes after the fall, when you’re knee deep in the mud and muck of BEING in love. Me? I’m full on in love… the REAL kind. Where the movie leaves off and you think they just ride off into the sunset forever but really they go home and someone has to do the dishes after dinner and someone else forgot to pick up milk at the store. Being in love is the day to day drudgery and gloriousness that comes long after the butterflies of a first date… it’s the moments that still take your breath away even in the midst of all the moments when you’re too busy to notice just how good you have it.
Of course, BEING in love isn’t the stuff of movies…. Falling in love is more delirious; more suited for romance. Falling in love is an epic anthem played by a symphony while you run through a field of daffodils clutching your beloved’s hand. Falling in love is… decidedly easy, if we’re being honest. But BEING in love? Being in love is a horse of a different color.
Being in love is rolling your eyes because he forgot to pick up yellow table cloths at the dollar store, but loving him for spending $23 there anyway on random things for your son’s birthday party. Being in love is sometimes getting up early enough to make breakfast and sometimes shrugging and saying “no” because you don’t have to DO things to love someone. You don’t have to cook or clean or anything else… but sometimes you do. Sometimes I do. But I do it not because it’s my duty or my job to please him. I do it not because a woman is SUPPOSED to do those things for a man… I do it because it makes him happy. And making him happy makes me so happy that it really feels like a selfish act.
Sometimes we fight. Sometimes I get so mad at him that I think my head will fly off my neck, orbit the Earth and then explode in a mushroom cloud of anger at his door step. Sometimes I hurt his feelings and sometimes he hurts mine. But when that happens, our love means saying sorry… and BEING sorry. Because it hurts to hurt the person you love.
Sometimes he drives me bat shit crazy… But sometimes? He brings me the centerpiece off a work lunch table. Sometimes he calls just to say “hi.” Sometimes he grabs my hand and wraps his fingers into mine with a ferocious gentleness that makes me smile so big my cheeks nearly split. Sometimes he is mostly perfect. Sometimes I am nearly there myself. And sometimes… maybe more of the time… we are both individual disasters.
But we love each other. And although we are totally imperfect individuals, I think we’re totally perfect together. Because when we’re together we work hard at being more for each other… more than just two imperfect people. I guess… if falling in love is Drew Barrymore standing on the pitcher’s mound while Michael Vartan walks purposely toward her for a kiss, being in love is the couple they don’t show. The one sitting in the stands with their two kids fighting over who gets which end of the hotdog while they, the parents take that one moment to glance up at each other and the father presses his knee slightly against hers… and she knows.
He loves her. She loves him.
And that is all that matters.
