posted
I was going to start this thread, but Farmgirl's excellent one made me pause. Her's is a bit more urgent.
This snow elongated weekend gave me and my wife time to prepare our house for the children we are hoping to adopt.
That means cleaning out all the old junk to make room for them and their new junk.
Yesterday I attacked the junk closet, which will soon be our Clown closet. Hey, I'm a clown and proud of it.
Behind the stacks of old D&D books (anyone want a classic Fiend Folio or 1st Edition Monster Manual for a not cheap price. I've been told they are collectables now. Honest. A great investment.) and the cook books and the stack of manilla envelopes for the stories I've never sent out, was the box of old love letters.
It was bulging and had silly, useless things in it, so I decided to weed out the trash from the gems.
There were ticket stubs from movies my wife and I saw when we were dating. They weren't dated, and they weren't the first movie or the special one, or the one where I proposed afterword. I threw them out.
There were the letters. Some of them were diabetically sweet. Some hurt to read. They talked of issues and fears and worries that everyone has when they are dating and only in their teens or early twenties.
Many of you young kids don't realize it, but those fears and worries and insecurities that you are feeling right now---you know, the ones everyone says are normal for kids your age, well they will still be with you twenty years from now.
That's right.
That's scarey.
However, as I reread those letters I remembered to well the close calls my wife and I had with walking away from each other back then. We didn't understand what we felt, or why, or what the other person was really feeling. We tried to hide it all under sillyness and romantic words, and gushy-sweet icing.
Underneath it all we were scared we had drifted apart, or that there was someone else, or that they didn't love us as much as we loved them.
We have dropped the gush-sweet icing. Now silences and work and computer time takes its place. We still find excuses not to ask the tough questions. We still fear to hear the tough news. We still both see our relationship as a fragile thing that must be handled carefully, with lots of attention, and too much reliance on luck.
Don't get me wrong. My marriage is strong and my wife and I are closer than ever. Yet that doesn't stop me from avoiding a disagreement longer than I should, or taking too long a pause before broaching a difficult discussion with her. It doesn't mean that I don't give her all the attention she deserves sometime, or the other way around. Underneath all these years of experience and practice, there are still two scared lonely people desperate to make sure the other doesn't leave. If anything, the history we have together makes us realize how much we want to stay together.
There have been a few times when rifts have occured in our relationship. There have been times when fear and doubt and surprisingly little anger, have threatened to swamp us. But what is most surpring...the roots of that fear, the same doubt and even a bit of the same anger, can be seen so clearly in these letters that are 17 or 18 years old.
I held a letter that is now older than my wife was when she wrote it.
She was asking me in that letter whether I dated her because I loved her, or because she kissed so well.
I had to stop and ask myself when was the last time I told my wife that I loved her, and didn't expect a kiss, or anything more, in return? When was the last time I told my wife I loved her for her, not for sex or for her cleaning the house or for the thousand things she does for me.
I also had my responses to those letters in the same box. I realized how poorly I handled that question before. After 18 years of practice, tonight I hope to answer it better.
So all you young lovers out there, make sure to keep your old love letters, whether they are on paper, or an unused swatch of paper towel, or in your hard drive.
And all you old lovers out there, reread the old letters. Fall in love all over again. This time, however, do it better.
posted
The unfinished fights are like leftovers in the fridge. They never get all better on their own, do they?
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Don't take this the wrong way, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a dobie because the title... wasn't funny.
But it was interesting. Maybe I don't relate 100% because I'm only 15 years out of high school. Maybe I will come full circle by 20 years. But I was Marianne Dashwood after all.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
That's why I keep a journal. Someday the guy who loves me can really understand me by reading my journal.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Hmmm. I use my journal as the last stop for everything that I can't talk to my husband about. Believe it or not, there is stuff I don't say on Hatrack. I think he would read it if, Heaven Forbid, anything happened to me, but I'd be spinning in my grave. I used to be more adamant about it than I am now. But there is some stuff I'd like to edit. If I could find it. Whatever.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Wow, Dan. That was absolutely beautiful. Of course, now my thread will completely disappear, but that's okay.
Seriously, though, I enjoy virtually everything you post, but this was, in my opinion, the most touching and insightful of all.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Hmmm... I probably phrased that wrong. I don't know that I'd actually LET someone read my journal, but I'd read it to them... If I died... O_o; Well, let's just say there's stuff I'd be happier with my family not knowing.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
In a way, it's very comforting, too. The same issues may be there twenty years from now, but that means that the whole world doesn't flip around twenty years from now, so it's not such a huge crap shoot, maybe. That's nice.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Hat]](graemlins/hat.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
