“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.” Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
26 years ago today, on August 7th, 1995, I met Andrea on a Caribbean Island. From the very beginning, I have signed every letter, note, birthday card and text message with the acronym LHR.
Love, Honesty, Respect.
Through the years I have added two more letters. A & C.
Acceptance & Compassion.
This is what I aspire for in our relationship and in our family… in my life.
LHRAC. Our own private reminder.
I wish I could say that our marriage has been nothing but LHRA&C. However, anyone who has ever been in a long relationship… a marriage. Anyone who has a family… kids… we know that this type of perfection is an illusion, and the most we can aspire to is becoming somewhat ‘imperfectly perfect’… a phrase that I love to use to describe us.
I spoke to my childhood best friend the other day. It has been literally a lifetime since we had last spoken. During our conversation, the words “It is great that you guys are together for 25 some years and can be happy every day!”, slipped out of his mouth. “That is a humungous load of a statement”, I kiddingly and seriously replied. I say slipped because I am pretty sure that he already knows that the fairytale is only a tale, and that pretty much everybody lives in a more realistic version of the world with real problems to solve and real relationships to fight for. There are no flawless scripts handed out when you exhange your promises, and the things that are hysterical on the screen, are a lot less humorous in our actual lives. Nevertheless…
after 26 years, I am so grateful that we have seen a lot of LHRAC in our home. I fly the words love, honesty, respect, acceptance and compassion all over the place every day. I emphasize things like kindness and inner beauty and impeccable speaking. Some days it helps us get through a deliciously blissful day. Other days, my husband and daughters probably wish that they could put masking tape over my mouth!
It is on these days, that despite my ‘mantras’ … we see alot of all the rest.
Thoughts, words and actions…
explosions that I am not exactly proud of, but grateful for just the same.
It is in these moments, the bumpy, less impeccable ones, that we are forced to grow individually. Each mess up is an opportunity to become stronger and closer as a couple and family.
“Love is a meeting of two souls, fully accepting the dark and the light within each other.”
We have experienced an abundance of love, but we have also experienced feelings of hate.
We have been both beautifully and brutally honest, but we have also been dreadfully dishonest to both ourselves and to each other.
We have demonstrated respect, but we have also demonstrated not so pretty lapses of disrespect.
We have learned to accept many things about one another, but this does not prevent some inevitable rejection to seep in as well.
We have focused on compassion… we have ‘suffered with‘… but, there are times when we have been possessed by weakness or complete exhaustion… forgotten to faithfully follow our huge, loving hearts. In these moments, a breed of indifference momentarily prevails.
After 26 years together, we have experienced the extreme highs and the extreme lows. I never expected it to be smooth sailing. Even at a young, innocent age, I knew that it was going to be about moving gracefully with the waves.
I never gave into the thought that there were two people perfect for each other, believing instead that there are just two people willing to give all that it possibly takes to cultivate the LHRAC. It is often a question of how badly we want to hold on.
We have loved passionately and fought just as fiercely. We have felt it all exactly how it should all be felt. Every passionate moment reminds us that we are fully alive and that we still have so many places that we still need to journey to together.
I do not have a perfect marriage or family. We are not perfect partners or parents. Beautiful photos of us at our best are great to post, but they cannot possibly tell the whole story. This is simply the truth. I can say this with pride and gratitude because we may not be perfect, but we are still here. Together. What an incredible accomplishment nowadays.
On the other side of the photos there we are. Beautifully, imperfectly together. Loving and sometimes hating. Aspiring towards complete honesty. Forgiving each other and also ourselves for the untruths that we tell. Demonstrating respect and acceptance and compassion… except during those moments when our uglier sides are all that we are able to display.
“Perfection is an illusion that stops people from trying.” – Steven Aitchison
And the amazing thing is that this is all exceptionally ok.
We do not need to be perfect. Appear perfect. Strive for perfect. We can be cracked and still feel whole together.
Cracked. 26 years. It is what allows the light to continue to shine through.
This is us. Here. Now. Still in love. Perhaps our greatest feat so far.
I absolutely adore a line from the movie “The Vow” starring Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams. In the movie, the daughter (McAdams) asks her mother why she stayed with her father all these years when she knows that he cheated on her.
Her mother answers, “I choose to stay with him for all the things that he does right, instead of leaving him for the one thing that he did wrong.”
Extraordinary. Gorgeous. Perfect Imperfection.
This is what love is for me. This is the true love story. Imperfectly, perfect. Flawed, but real. A bit cracked, chipped and broken and still in its own special way, integrate and complete.
If anything, this is what I desire people to see. This is what we feel on the good days and even on the bad. I am so proud. I am so grateful. I am so very much in love with him, my chosen soul mate. I am still so very much in love with us.
Only God knows how much I love you.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
This is my love letter to celebrate us today… on the 26th anniversary of the day that we first laid eyes on one another in the casino, at the ice-cream shop and at Cherie’s café. It was love at first, second and third site then and CM, if it is possible, I fall in love with you and our imperfect perfect story again and again every single day!
You drain me with your noise and intensiveness. I infuriate you with my desire for silence and equanimity. I don’t know why, but there is still something remarkable keeping us united. We are opposites in so many ways and we still don’t exactly complete each other. Perhaps we never will, but I love the idea of having the rest of our lives together trying to learn how.
Happy Anniversary CM! Thank you for everything you do and for putting up with my few, huge flaws! Thank you for holding me up and still holding onto me so tightly after all these years!
LHRAC and always and 4ever,
Your SB
PS: What a year! We made it!
“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
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