From Every Day I Love You More (just not today)
The difference between courtship and marriage is the difference between the pictures in a seed catalogue and what comes up. – James Wharton
My friend Martha and I had a game we would play as young girls while we walked home together from school. We’d gaze into the future and imagine ourselves all grown up, living life side by side. Our children would play together, as would our dogs, while we drank coffee and churned out bestsellers. Our rich, handsome husbands would be off at work, writing symphonies and transplanting hearts, but they’d always stop to buy roses on their way home for dinner (coq au vin, with chocolate mousse for dessert).The details changed with the times – at some point the composer morphed into a rock star – but I kept on playing right into adulthood, even though Martha had moved far away. By the time I walked down the aisle (not an aisle at all, but the front porch of an old country inn, I’d spent more than two decades inventing the details of my happily married life.
Every now and then, more than fifteen years later, I still catch myself measuring the distance between then and now. I look at my marriage, my husband, my life, and I think: This is not what I pictured. Where are the children? The roses? The mousse? Then my gaze shifts to what’s there instead.
I can’t remember the last time my husband sent flowers, but just this week he came home with a gift. Jake and I had gone out front to greet him, and I could tell it was coming by the look on his face. He reached into his black bag and pulled it out with a flourish: a big piece of clear bubble wrap. Jake ran over to sniff it and my husband popped one of the bubbles; Jake lunged forward and barked wildly. This went on a few more times, until Jake sank his teeth into the plastic, popping bubble after bubble as he bit. By this time he’d gotten the hang of the game and was zooming around at top speed with the bubble wrap in his mouth and the two of us, in hysterics, at his heels. You probably had to be there, but trust me on this: it was the most fun I’d had in a week.
Small surprises and unexpected pleasures are the Miracle-Gro of a marriage, helping it blossom and thrive. Like your houseplants, your marriage still needs to be fed in order to stay in top form. When I mentioned this to my husband, he said he understood just what I meant. Then he reminded me of one day last summer when I’d placed a ripe peach in his hand. “Here,” I said. “Smell something wonderful that you haven’t smelled for a whole year.”
“It was big and fat and juicy,” he recalled. “I smelled the stem end and it smelled like heaven on a summer day. The peach itself affected me strongly, but I also felt a wave of love and appreciation for you for having pointed it out to me.” And when he told me the story, I felt a wave of love, too, that he’d remembered it so well for so long.
So there you have it, one couple’s secrets for staying together: bubble wrap and a ripe peach. After all, it’s the little things as much as the big things that hold people together over the years. And no fictional marriage can ever compete with the real one that takes root and grows.
No, this isn’t the marriage I pictured. But this is the marriage I have. Challenging, frustrating, comforting, loving, evolving with every new day. As surprising as a bouquet of bubble wrap; as rich as a ripe summer peach.
