A Love Letter to My Husband

Everyone talks about what love IS.  Weddings almost always include the words, “love is patient, love is kind…”  Greeting cards, posters, and books are filled with what love IS.  Rarely do people talk about what love isn’t.  And yet, I find that the absence of certain qualities is exactly what makes true love different from all other variations of love.  Most people who are in love can point to some example in their lives that supports what love IS…and yet, their lives are also filled with free radicals that eat away at the healthy love and secretly birth cancers that crowd out what is good.  For some, these cancers will be maintained, causing only mild sickness and discomfort.  For others, it will take over until every space where love used to be is rusted and rotted.

True love is the absence of certain things.  It isn’t that two people work to eradicate these things; it is that true love creates the absence of oxygen for these things to live and grow in the first place.  Here is what true love ISN’T:

Judgment: This is the little and the big things.   Judgment hides in little statements that are written off as “just kidding” or “no big deal.”  It ends in “you are too sensitive.” It is veiled by jokes and eye rolls and chips away at the identity and worth of someone else.   Judgment lies in what is said and unsaid and it speaks to how we view each other.  It feels harmless, and yet is perhaps the most cancerous of the ISN’T’s. 

Keeping Score: Love understands the natural ebb and flow in life.  Love ensures that everyone’s needs are met when they need to be met.  It understands that as long as each party is putting the other first, everyone will always be cared for and will feel safe and supported.  Love doesn’t have memory capacity to keep score.  It doesn’t remember inequalities of yesterday, first because it doesn’t have the capacity to view it as an inequality, and second because it is busy making sure everyone’s needs are being met today.

Fear: Fear of losing love.  Fear of being judged.  Fear of not being enough.  Fear that revealing the “true self” will make the other cringe. Fear creates cancer in the heart and the mind.  It causes misperceptions and misunderstandings.  Fear creates the urge to attack in order to protect and hide vulnerabilities.  True love identifies vulnerabilities in the other and helps to protect those vulnerabilities from the outside world instead of using those vulnerabilities to win an argument or hold as collateral.

This seems like an odd love letter to my husband. And yet, before I met him, I didn’t understand that love was not only the presence of certain things, but the absence of other things.  I didn’t understand the power of love to grow and flourish, to be happy and strong.  I didn’t understand how to nourish love and how to protect against the free radicals that hide in the environment.  I would like to thank him for showing me true love.  I would like to thank him for showing me how to love, fully and completely, without fear, judgment, and scorecards.  I would like to thank him for the abundance of beautiful memories of those in existence and of those yet to come.

 Happy Valentine’s Day.