An Old Married Couple

This is a pregnancy and parenting blog, but for those of you who are in a relationship and you have kids, you ultimately learn that those worlds are intersecting and will become a jumbled tangle, also known as your life.  Parenting is not it's own entity.  Marriage is not it's own, either.  This is how I learned this lesson.

Over Christmas break, some lovely friends came to visit.  They stayed for several days and we enjoyed exploring our city and spending time with them.  They are couple who have been together for two years and are beautifully caught up in each other's love.  Their physical proximity never strays more than a few feet apart and they have this look of general delight at the existence of the other.  It was sweet.  

And then it hit me...I had not so much as kissed my husband that entire day! How did this happen?  How did we become...an old married couple?

My husband and I were lucky enough to meet early in life.  We were spared the journey of time and miles searching for each other.  We met in middle school.  In high school, I fell in love with him and 11 years later, I am still in love with him.  

We have been married almost four years and have a good life.  Yet, seeing our friends still falling in love, made me feel something like sadness.  I wanted it back.  I wanted the hand holding and the offering to hold doors and the long looks, and the tenderness.  I wanted it back.  

So, naturally, I tried to recreate it.  Standing close, sitting close, all of it.  You know how that went?  We tripped over each other in the kitchen, got super mad at a restaurant, and had a tearful argument when everyone else was sleeping.  It was a lot of stress and emotions and when I thought about it, it was all something I made up.  I let jealousy in and I got bit.  Even as it was happening, I knew better, but the wave continued to crash over me, until I was upside down, freaking out, and had a mouthful of sand.  I thought of all the articles and blogs that blow up my social media feeds about how women are princesses and men should do this, that and the other thing to please them.  While I don't take issue with these things inherently (a man should honor his wife), I feel that these messages teach us to be dissatisfied.  To be thinking only of ourselves.  Sure, I would love back rubs and surprise dates, but really, what I want is someone to unload the dishwasher now and then and listen to me talk about how my day was.  

I saw our friends' budding life together, and I started thinking of what I wanted and forgot about what I had- a husband who fixes everything that breaks, a husband who works insane hours for the good of our family, a person who loves me as the disheveled, perpetually exhausted, anxiety-ridden, no-make-up-wearing-self.  We may have left behind the elaborate dates, but we became a couple who works together to achieve our respective goals. We may have left behind the physical closeness we used to know, but we became a married couple who carried each other through job loss, a car accident, a cancer diagnosis, and lost family members.  We became an old married couple who loved each other so much, there was enough left over to make an entirely new human being.