Does Falling in Love Last?
not-quite-advice from a marriage newb
A few months back I was sitting around the table with my husband, Mom, and housemates. We were discussing our house budget. In the middle of this necessary and fundamental, though very un-sexy, conversation, I found myself staring at my Joe, full of longing and desire. It was the manly shape of his beard and the shadow of his cut jaw, the way he spoke about business and caring for others. It was full of potential for a noon seduction, but my fantasies never got very far.
There were six kids running around nearby, in and out of the slamming back door, needing water, falling down, needing hugs. Nap time was approaching, my mom wanted lunch, and I was probably struck with pregnancy heartburn as is often the case in the afternoons.
Bodies began to shuffle around. My husband went to the garden with our oldest. My mom read a bedtime story and went home. The littles went down for a nap. My housemates went to gather a kid from school. I went for a bike ride. My hips were feeling stale.
I fell into thinking about my desire for Joe. It’d come in three waves during that forty-five-minute conversation. Each time my attention was pulled away. But even as I recalled it then, riding my bike around the suburban man-made lake on a hot Southern afternoon, the same feeling of tenderness and warmth in my lower abdomen came alive. Am I still in love with my husband? Somehow the question felt both obvious and ludicrous. Shouldn’t I be? But what are the chances? A decade later, four kids, a couple businesses, and more fights than I can count, and here I am, still overcome like the sex-seeking twenty-two-year-old I was when we met.
I haven’t had many falling-in-love experiences. I dated only two people and married the second. My stomach couldn’t handle much more desire than this. Dating apps, I’m convinced, would have only pushed me farther into the anti-marriage cynicism of my parents’ end-of-marriage and post-divorce eras. As a teenager and young adult during these years, I count it a miracle, from heaven, that I somehow escaped what I saw as the easy, maybe inevitable fate, of becoming a single shut-in forever.
I met Joe at the first job I had after graduation. He became my best friend before we ever held hands or shared a kiss. The intimacy of conversation and pursuit of common interests was more intentional than in any relationship I’d experienced prior. Romantic or otherwise. We were loving each other. We took a typical trajectory. Two years of dating, a wedding, and a cross-country move. We were also typical in being naive, selfish, shortsighted, and unable to consider the risks.
For a long time, I didn’t believe my salvation from a life of loneliness to be a matter of divine intervention, but rather the work of a man who took pity and married me. This was the result of a broken self-image. I was an unremarkable, kind of overweight, somewhat pretty, young woman, who was, in earnest, more attracted to women than men. I’d stumbled into a situation in which a man I was convinced could never love me was now obligated to do so until the day he died. This makes a lot of sense of my extreme discomfort at having a wedding. I made my husband cry two days before the date when I begged for an elopement.
It shouldn’t have taken me all these years to believe he really loves me. There are the three births he’s watched, unflinching in expression while I went animal. All those months of post-partum bleh. The weight packed on and falling off again. All the nights we didn’t sleep. It shouldn’t have taken the better part of a decade to be as confident as I am today in the fact of his love for me. And the fact of his desire for me too. But it did. It has.
For a couple with their fourth kid on the way who keep bakery hours, we’re pretty into each other. We kiss every day and even make out. We have sex three or four times most weeks. We’re busy and always tired and sometimes forget. But forgetting used to be a personal offense. Proof that his love for me was waning, or in fact, had never been. When we get to it, though, I’m proud to say that it really is hotter than ever.
As I was considering this question of falling in love and its ability to withstand all the tests of life, I read
. She published a New York Times column that went viral back in 2015 titled, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This”. It chronicles an experiment she performed with a man who was then an acquaintance. Catron and her date asked each other a series of questions designed by a group of social psychologists to engage a pair in increasingly intimate conversation. Then they made eye contact for four minutes, a feat that sounds excruciating to most of us. The piece is compelling, and a tale of success.[1]While a decade of marriage feels long to me, it is, hopefully, just a splash in the pan for what’s ahead. Choosing who you marry is a big decision. Choosing how you stay married, though, feels even bigger. I’ve enjoyed reading Catron and think her tool for finding a mate agrees with my experience as well. Maybe this is good even for us already married people who need a little reacquainting or rekindling. While I can extol the merits of my marriage and the joy I find in it, the wrestle for this reality is an everyday thing. It’s easy to slip into lazy communication or even silence. Practical wisdom plays a big part in the daily disciplines required for not only contentment but flourishing.
I think I’ve made my commitment to intimate conversations clear in the space of The Multihyphenate Housewife. There was the way I exposed myself to the librarian, the insecurities in seeking out my son’s heart about birthdays, and of course, my latest pregnancy overshare. Eye contact is another commitment in our house. We call it face time. Two people sitting face-to-face, staring at each other.
When we first started this about two years ago, I couldn’t do it with my husband or oldest son without crying. I felt vulnerable, exposed, and uncomfortable at the physical act of being seen. I was overwhelmed. Overcome. It almost always carried some confession of fear or despair or uncertainty out of me. But the more I practiced, the more it became normal to see my family and be seen by them.
Now I look into Joe’s eyes, sitting on the floor, legs crossed like a child, and I’m comforted at being seen by him, at having his undivided attention, at the option to sit and stare at each other. We put aside all the words that might be bubbling up inside us, and all the thoughts that get louder than reality. We look. We study. We appreciate. It’s thanksgiving that boils out of me then. These are the eyes I’ll stare into until I die.
Falling in love, or being in love, has an edge to it. Love is equally riddled with feelings of dread and despair, as with ecstasy and ethereal happiness. It seems to me that love is just as much about brokenheartedness as it is about the peaceful comfort and serenity of being secure in someone else. Jesus is central to the growth of my relationship to love itself, embodied through others. He’s the perfection of the craft, the partnership. Without the example of laying down my life with the expectation of betrayal and forgiveness, I’m sure I’d be on the road to divorce or have walked it already.
I believe I’m more in love now than I’ve ever been. The freedom and even abandon I feel in being able to give myself over to it, with all its ups and downs, is actual euphoria. I can laugh at the end of the day. I can laugh about having put the burden of my love with all its selfish expectations on my amazing, thoughtful, attractive husband who is himself just a man bound by human weakness. There’s joy here. I still get hurt and occasionally lash out in anger. But I’ve learned to express myself candidly. If that moment is ugly, at least it’s honest. At least my insides aren’t rotting with bitterness and despair; with silence. I’m more loving for being real. My husband and kids get to see who I am, and when they see it and love me – forgive me – I know that what’s there, that energy connecting our souls, is true love.
[1] To hear more about this road to success, read Catron’s memoir by the same title. It’s a thoughtful and fun, SATC-style love/breakup story and cultural criticism. Catron really pulled this off. I was not only entertained but thoughtful of the job of raising girls.
Char - thank you for sharing this piece. It is a good reminder that there are many different ways to be connected and intimate and it won't look the same our whole lives. xx
Thanks for sharing!