Romantic relationships

Doorway to a More Brilliant Reality

/ James Browning

romeo-and-juliet

I used to think Romeo and Juliet was the greatest love story ever written. But now that I’m middle-aged, I know better. Oh, Romeo certainly thinks he loves his Juliet. Driven by hormones, he unquestionably lusts for her. But if he loves her, it’s a shallow love.

You want proof? Soon after meeting her for the first time, he realizes he forgot to ask her for her name. Can true love be founded upon such shallow acquaintance? I don’t think so.

And at the end, when he thinks she’s dead, he finds no comfort in living out the remainder of his life within the paradigm of his love, at least keeping alive the memory of what they had briefly shared, even if it was no more than illusion, or more accurately, hormonal.

Yes, those of us watching events unfold from the darkness know she merely lies in slumber. But does he seek the reason for her life-like appearance? No. Instead he accuses Death of amorousness, convinced that the ‘lean abhorred monster’ endeavors to keep Juliet in her present state, cheeks flushed, so that she might cater to his own dissolute desires.

But does Romeo hold her in his arms one last time and feel the warmth of her blood still coursing through her veins? Does he pinch her to see if she might awaken? Does he hold a mirror to her nose to see if her breath fogs it? Once, twice, three times a ‘no.’

His alleged love is so superficial and so selfish that he seeks to escape the pain of loss by taking his own life. That’s not love, but infatuation. Had they wed ― Juliet bearing many children, bonding, growing together, the masks of the star-struck teens they once were long ago cast away, basking in the love born of a lifetime together ― and she died of natural causes, would Romeo have been so moved to take his own life, or would he have grieved properly for her loss and not just his own. J. Conrad Guest

Clearly I remember at sixteen going with my friend David to see Franco Zeffirelli’s movie “Romeo and Juliet”. My young heart swooned at what I then thought was a magnificent love to be admired. Heartbreak, grief, contentment and joy have conspired together to teach me how foolish Shakespeare’s characters would have been in real life.

Love should be a bit foolish, irrational and even unwise, but not simplistically childish like I now perceive Romeo and Juliet in the story told of them. Beautiful tale, but a horrible example of love in real life. I still believe in the magic more than ever but not how portrayed in the Shakespearean story. In coming to my present point of view, I am grateful for every heartache and beautiful moment loving ever brought me. Such feelings have been my tutors of the truths of love.

It is having once believed in fairy tales, then seeing beyond them while retaining their essence that has given my heart its ability to love best in the real world.

The fairy tale is not the conclusion,
but the doorway to a more brilliant reality.
Pushed onto a pedestal as the final answer
their worth is misshapen and distorted.
Natalie Nyquist

Love At Whatever Age

/ James Browning

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Romantic Love has been described as… intense emotional experiences such as increased energy, euphoria, obsessive thinking about the loved one, feelings of dependency and craving. When people are ‘in love’ they may feel as if they have uncovered the meaning of life. People often report feeling complete and that their life feels whole.

Bronte superbly captured the experience in Wuthering Heights: ‘‘I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but, as my own being.” The arts continue to be consumed by efforts to describe and understand romantic love.

The book by Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, is but one example of a story illustrating the power of enduring love, where a couple fall in love in their youth, go their separate ways during midlife and return to one another’s arms in their old age. Michael Hogan, Ph.D

Ah, ha! So there is yet hope for me! Now some random facts about people and love:

The age-group most likely to find love abroad is the over-sixties. Almost 10 per cent of holiday romances lead to wedding bells.

Engagement rings are often worn on the fourth finger of the left hand because the ancient Greeks maintained that finger contains the vena amoris, or the “vein of love,” that runs straight to the heart. The first recorded wedding rings appear in ancient Egypt, with the circle representing eternity as well as powerful sun and moon deities.

A four-leaf clover is often considered good luck, but it is also part of an Irish love ritual. In some parts of Ireland, if a woman eats a four-leaf clover while thinking about a man, supposedly he will fall in love with her.

Plato asserts in his Symposium that initially all humans were whole, hermaphroditic beings with four hands, four legs, two identical faces on one head/neck, four ears, and both sets of genitals. When these beautiful, strong beings tried to overthrow the gods, Zeus split them into two—man and woman— and created the innate desire of human beings for one another to feel whole again.

Scientists suggest that merely staring into another person’s eyes is a strong precursor to love. In an experiment, strangers of the opposite sex were put in a room together for 90 minutes where they talked about intimate details and then stared into each other’s eyes without talking. Many felt a deep attraction for each other, and two married each other six months later.

To remain in love for a lifetime, therapists advise couples to listen actively to your partner, ask questions, give answers, appreciate, stay attractive, grow intellectually, include your partner, give him/her privacy, be honest and trustworthy, tell your mate what you need, accept his/her shortcomings, give respect, never threaten to leave, say “no” to adultery, don’t assume the relationship will last forever, and cultivate variety.

While living life alone is something I have become accustomed to, I grateful to still daydream about lasting romantic love coming into my life. Until the day I die and beyond, I will remain open to true love; not driven to it… but open to the possibility.

The human heart, at whatever age,
opens to the heart that opens in return.
Maria Edgeworth

Letter to a Heartbroken Friend

/ James Browning

33373_originalEDITDear _______,

Don’t worry about the future. It will unfold as it does, unaffected by your thought and worry. What is to be will not be swayed one millimeter by your anguish. I know you are heartbroken, but it is not love that is the source of most of your pain. Love is always pure and never the source of grief.  Given time, if you allow it, misery and sorrow will overpower the purity of your love and bury it in animosity and bitterness. Please don’t let that happen.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing… Elizabeth Gilbert

Comfort and happiness, as enjoyable as they feel, are not catalysts for personal development. It’s the difficult times where fertile ground exists for our growth. Please do not hate your pain. Growth is always uncomfortable; sometimes even agonizing. Accept the hurting with a thankfulness for what was instead of a dread for what might or might not be again one day.

I wish I could tell you getting past your heartbreak will be easy. It won’t be. But if you intentionally let go a little each day, slowly your aching will ease. With effort you’ll be able to not think about your loss for a little while at a time and with practice your heartache will be out of heart and mind more and more. Progress will be slow, but certain if you make is so.

Giving her the space she has asked you for is a certain way to show your love to her. To cling and grab to hold on, will only shred into jagged pieces what was once shared. If there is more for you two to share, it will arrive in its due time and not one second before.

Peace and Love,

James

I am grateful for friends who are comfortable enough with me to share their deep private feelings. It is in a common trust and sharing of emotion and thought with others who “get me and I them” that healing and recovery is possible.

We crucify ourselves between two thieves:
regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.
Fulton Oursler

Wiser, Stronger, Older…

/ James Browning

aged_feb15From an article on-line, comes these three steps about how to fall in love.
1. Find a complete stranger.
2. Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
3. Then, stare deeply into each others eyes without talking for four minutes.
Psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love. He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married. http://www.youramazingbrain.org/lovesex/sciencelove.htm

Falling in love is easy. I have done it a number of times in my life. Some lasted a short while; some endured for years; none lasted a lifetime. The ups and downs taught me a good deal including the following random rules for managing one’s self when starting to fall in love:

  • Be patient. Resist the urge to move too quickly.
  • Listen. Pay attention to what is said.
  • Remember what the other person tells you about his/her self.
  • Don’t sacrifice your “must-haves”.
  • Be prepared to meet in the middle on everything but “must-have’s”.
  • Let the other person be as they are; not how you wish they were.
  • Everything changes once physical intimacy begins. Put it off as long as you can.
  • Don’t judge this new love by the ones from your past.
  • Don’t pretend to be what you’re not.
  • Some people do change, but most do not.
  • A new love does not care to know about the lovers of your past.
  • Learn to sit quietly together saying nothing. Let eyes do the talking.
  • Love is not for filling holes of emptiness within.
  • Love can only make you more of what you already are.
  • Ask yourself, “could I die peacefully in this person’s arms?”
  • Without trust love never survives.

There is no question being attracted to someone is a key ingredient to falling in love. However, research has shown kindness and intelligence are very close behind. While being attracted to someone is nearly instantaneous, how kind and intelligent a person is can only accurately become known over time. Of the two, studies have shown kindness is the strongest indicator for a successful long-term relationship.

Wiser, stronger, older… with a bit more time I may actually begin to understand this thing called love. I am grateful for my progress.

Love is simple.
You fall and that’s it.
You’ll work the other stuff out.
You just gotta let yourself fall
and have faith that someone
will be there to catch you.
From “My Favorite Mistake”
by Chelsea M. Cameron

Reasons Why I Cannot Love You

/ James Browning

beautiful leaf wallpaperThe following was written by Kat George a year and a half ago for thoughtcatalogue.com. It’s well crafted and hit me hard, right between the eyes!

Don’t get me wrong—I think you’re great. I like to eat dinner across from you, quickly glancing down at the fork idly fondling my food when you catch my eye. I like the coy smiles that pass between us, and the way that once we’re both drunk you become brave enough to hold my hand, and I become excited enough to hold it back. I like it when my phone vibrates in the night and it’s you saying something completely irrelevant, just so you could text me. I like that you like me; I like what we have.

But I can’t love you. I can’t love you because I couldn’t love the one before you, and I wont be able to love the one after you. It’s not because you’re not wonderful, or because you don’t deserve to be loved. It’s because you’ve melted into those other ones—you’re all the same. None of the dinners, the lazy days spent in bed cradling each other’s naked bodies, the little things you whisper to me, none of it is new. I’ve heard and done these things before, the motions are repetitive, and my responses are habitual. I can’t love you because we don’t have that special… thing… that makes every one of these practiced encounters seem brand new.

I can’t love you because I’m measuring you against a yard-stick from long ago, and you keep falling short. Every movement you make, every tiny word you utter, I pick up and hold towards the sun to see if you’ll turn transparent and I’ll see him inside your skin. When he’s not there—and he never is—I know I’ll never be able to love you. I haven’t and I can’t move on; it’s not your fault. I know I’m being entirely ridiculous, but when he haunts my sleep and I awaken in the morning only to see your resting eyes and your mouth agape on the pillow next to me, I feel disappointed, and I hate that I feel that way. I can’t love you because I’m entangled in the past, and I’m still not ready for the future.

I can’t love you because you adore me too much. Every time I wish for you to stop flattering me, to stop agreeing with me on every little thing, to stop f#cking doing every completely nonsensical thing I ask of you, it makes me feel sick, ungrateful and mean. You’re wonderful for thinking I’m wonderful, but I can’t love you because you don’t love me for my flaws—you love me in spite of them. You don’t see me, you don’t even want to see me, for what I am—the ugly, pungent parts of my guts. You can’t and don’t want to tear these parts out of me while I scream. I can’t love you because you won’t defy me, because you won’t fight me when I’m wrong. I can’t love you because you don’t stand eye to eye with me and challenge me, demand of me, to be a better person.

I can’t love you because it’s too hard and I’m too busy. I’m so busy all the time; I barely have time to see my friends, the people I know I’ll be 80 with, if we all (God/ universe/ Mother Nature willing) make it that far. I keep trying to convince myself that you’re just not right for me but half the problem is I simply don’t have the time for you, and I didn’t realize my mental process was making these ludicrous deductions until a friend casually pointed out that I was a New Yorker now, and that New York was what was ‘happening’ to me. And here I was thinking I was just holding out for Mr. Right. I can’t love you because logically or illogically, my brain doesn’t compute having you any higher on my list of priorities.

I can’t love you because I’m happy on my own. It’s been almost a year now, and I’ve healed from the destructive force of a previous relationship. I’ve learned how to enjoy my own company and laugh at my own jokes. I can’t love you because if I do you’ll be in my bed with me at night, or worse, I’ll be at yours without my things around me. I wont be able to sleep spread-eagled, to eat crispy fried bacon in my underpants, to make plans to go out whenever I want, or to make plans to stay in whenever I want. I can’t love you because, right now, I’m enjoying my ‘me’ time far too much—I’m like a pig in sh!t. I can’t love you because for the first time in my life, I’m being selfish.

I can’t love you because I’m scared. Because I’ve been broken-hearted and I know the pain of losing something I love all too well. I don’t have another heartbreak in me, and sometimes when I look at you I imagine myself as a younger girl and I know I would have ridden into the sunset with you, had you asked, even if you were entirely wrong for me. I can’t love you because I’m so tired of love; its commitments and risks. I can’t love you because I don’t know if you’re worth the commitment or the risk and I’m not willing to find out the hard way, although I sincerely hope that one day I will be. I can’t love you because I don’t want to, and sometimes I’m afraid that makes me a bad person. By Kat George http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/reasons-why-i-cannot-love-you/

Change the reference points from “him” to “her” and just about every word here rings true for me personally, so much so it is unnerving. Such occurrences of unexpected introspection almost always bring me lasting insight. Thank you Kat!

I love you, with no beginning, no end…
Without fear. Without expectations.
Wanting nothing in return,
except that you allow me
to keep you here in my heart…
Coco J. Ginger

Love Letter to a Book

/ James Browning

EBBWhen first coming into view, I knew I had to have you. You were taller than most and your slim profile caused you to stand out. Even on the surface you appeared to be different from the others. Your delicate manner only made me desire you all the more. Visible gold initials identifying you gave me a hint of what you might be about. My initial impression was rewarded. You were be far beyond my first thoughts. I could not resist taking take you home with me.

Had I not titled this piece as being about a book it would be easy to surmise I had been recently smitten by a chance meeting of a lovely woman. The “lady” I met is the most beautiful copy of “Sonnets to the Portuguese” I have ever seen found yesterday at my favorite used book store. The photo above is an engraving from the book.

The “Sonnets…” were love poems written by Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-1846 for Robert Browning while they were carrying on their mostly secret courtship. Initially she was hesitant to publish the poems, feeling that they were too personal. However, once married her husband insisted that they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare’s time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided that she would publish them as supposed translations of foreign sonnets eventually settling on “Portuguese” (after Robert’s nickname for Elizabeth of “my little Portuguese”).

The forty-third “Sonnet to the Portuguese” begins “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” and is one of the most famous poems in the world and has been very popular since first published in 1850. Last night looking through the book I was struck by a previously over looked “Sonnet” that has been added to my personal favorites; Number 20.

Beloved, my Beloved, when I think
That thou wast in the world a year ago,
What time I sate alone here in the snow
And saw no footprint, heard the silence sink
No moment at thy voice … but, link by link,
Went counting all my chains, as if that so
They never could fall off at any blow
Struck by thy possible hand … why, thus I drink
Of life’s great cup of wonder! Wonderful,
Never to feel thee thrill the day or night
With personal act or speech,—nor ever cull
Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull,
Who cannot guess God’s presence out of sight.

 OR A modernized version interpretation

My darling, my love, when I think
That you were in the world a year ago,
While I sat by myself, out here in the cold,
Seeing no sign of you, just silence;
I never heard your voice. I just went over all my reasons
For being always sad, cementing them
Till it seemed they could never lift, no matter
What you tried…But then I tasted joy,
All the joy that life could give!
I couldn’t see then, that I would ever experience
Thrills like this, brought on by you–your words,
Some sense of you I never saw before now!
I must be as dull as an unbeliever,
Who can’t feel that God is here, though He is out of sight.

I have a Nook, thanks to my son and love it. When I travel the little marvel saves me from having to carry the weight of books. However, there is nothing like the look, smell, texture and quality of a real book. I fear in time reading from a book will mostly be forgotten, but I hope there will be a few diehards who relish the full experience of a book as I do. I am grateful for the joy reading has always brought me and for my love of books, most especially, the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that moves me down to the core of my being.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings,
and making music with them.
   Dennis Gabor

Deep-Burning and Unquenchable

/ James Browning

GriderEngagement005Many events of my life, both good and bad, have faded over time. There are exceptions such as the emotions of a particular time twenty-five years ago that have remained vividly alive. Emotionally it felt like being stretched and pulled apart between two horses. I’ve carried the self-inflicted wound, inside and unseen, long enough. Telling buried secrets stop them from poisoning the soul, so here goes…

My Father left my Mother, Brother and I shortly after my 7th birthday for another woman who was pregnant with his child. The devastation and bewilderment caused me to make a little boy promise to myself: someday if I had children I would never leave them like my Father left me.

Fast forward to 1987; I’m 35, have been married twelve years and have a beautiful young son who is five years old. A restless feeling about the marriage won’t leave me alone and slowly is getting worse. The birth of my boy soothed that away for a time, but by his fifth year feeling I wanted more had returned. The Mother of my son is a caring and good person who I learned a lot about the love of family from. I will always be grateful to her and her parents who accepted me openly and gave me a sense of belonging never experienced before. There was a problem though, I was no longer “in love” with her by the mid 80s when she unexpectedly became pregnant.

The first amends necessary is to B., my first wife. I should have been a man, stood strong and expressed my feelings. The high road would have been to do what was necessary to save the marriage or move on. But I didn’t. Until a few years ago I always put the reason for my weakness and lack of action on my childhood promise to never desert a child of mine. I know even today that was a good portion of my motivation then (or lack of it), but nowhere near the complete explanation.

In my desire not to hurt anyone, I have done nothing far too often. Saying goodbye to a lover has always been very, very difficult for me. Crippled by inaction I accomplished the opposite of my intentions repeatedly in romantic love relationships. I left a path of hurt and pain, not the least of which was to me.

There is no further explanation needed to explain I was ripe to fall in love with another woman in 1987. I met her on a business trip and she was so many things women I had been romantically involved with before were not. Including the woman I was married to, my tendency had been to gravitate to dependent women. K. was instead a breath-taking beauty who was strong, self-sufficient and successful. She had no need for a caretaker but now in her late 20s was ready to make a commitment and settle down. We fell head over heals in love, but did not find a happy ending.

Time has a way of creating rearward facing clarity. The late 80’s were when the spiral into my dysfunctions began in earnest. I became far too good at deception (although years later I learned not nearly as good as I thought at the time), but I sure did deceive myself and hurt a lot of people in the process.

Absolutely and without doubt I loved K. and to this day believe she loved me. In the early months she and I shared it was my sincere intention to get a divorce so we could be together. For a year and a half we shared long weekends every month or so and even managed to pull off a week-long vacation once that contained some of the most beautiful moments I’ve known. K. and I were well matched from intellect to emotion to politics and food. For a time there was no doubt in either of us that we’d be together the rest of our lives.

Ultimately I did not have the courage to do what was necessary. I never could find the strength to ask my first wife for a divorce. About a year and a half into our relationship K. did the right thing, ended our relationship and moved on with her life. We stayed in touch casually once in a while for another ten years until I began a serious relationship that became my second marriage. A good bit of the mementos of K. and I went up in smoke from my fireplace then. The most treasured keepsakes I sent to her with a note saying I could not longer have contact with her which she honored.

I have written all this to cast four admissions into the world on K.’s behalf: 1) The love I expressed to her was true and real 2) There is a part of my heart that will always belong to her 3) I will always be grateful she loved me,  and,  4) I have carried profound regret for hurting you hidden inside me now for 25 years. I am so very, very sorry. I am grateful for the relief admitting the truth just brought me.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame, very pretty,
often hot and fierce,
but still only light and flickering.
As love grows older,
our hearts mature
and our love becomes as coals,
deep-burning and unquenchable.
Bruce Lee

22 Years Later

/ James Browning

LOVE-LETTER-large570

Beautiful love stories still happen. This is from Huffington Post:

Cathy Knorr and Trevor Webb tied the knot, their relationship came full circle — and they had a middle school love letter to prove it.

At their October wedding, the couple, who met during sixth grade in 1990, displayed a letter Webb wrote to Knorr in middle school urging her to go out with him. Photographer Aislinn Kate Rehwinkel snapped a photo of the letter and it was posted on Reddit on Tuesday.

“Dear Cathy, I still like you and I still want you to go with me. I know Brad likes you. Please decide who you’re going to go with. Think hard and let me know your decision. I’ll be standing at the end of this hall and the beginning of the other hall. Meet me there as soon as school’s out and you can tell me. Sincerely, Trevor,” the letter reads.

“DON’T LET ANYONE SEE THIS,” it says at the top.

Knorr told HuffPost Weddings that she did meet Webb at the end of the hall and they dated for two weeks. But Knorr dumped Webb for another boy.

“He playfully reminds me from time to time, ‘You broke my heart and dumped me for Alex Norris!'” Knorr said.

Knorr and Webb eventually rebuilt their friendship, and remained best friends despite living in different cities after high school. They both returned to their hometown of Pensacola, Florida, in 2006, and Webb broke up with the girl he’d been dating shortly after that.

“Several weeks later we shared an unexpected and fateful kiss on the beach, having never blurred the lines of friendship. I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s what I’ve been missing all these years!'” Knorr told HuffPost. “Since that day we have been inseparable.”

Webb proposed to Knorr at an ice skating rink where he had given her a ring in middle school (this time, he gave her a diamond). Knorr had kept Webb’s middle school love letter in a shoebox in her closet and displayed it at their wedding.

“Trevor is a bit embarrassed of how insistent it sounded, but we sure did get a kick out of reading it and sharing it with others. I’m lucky to have found such a beautiful love in a best friend,” Knorr said. “I wish I had come to my senses sooner!”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/love-letter_n_2214622.html

So much is said and written today about relationships that don’t work or don’t work well. It warms my heart to know there are still real life “Cinderella and the handsome prince” stories. I am grateful for the reminder that good love between a man and woman is not as rare as I sometimes think it is.

I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you,
or if it was the second or third or fourth.
But I remember the first moment I looked at you
walking toward me and realized that somehow
the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you.
Cassandra Clare

Someone Somewhere for Everyone

/ James Browning

Some say a hapless romantic is hopeless; always searching, but never finding. They believe an insatiable yearning for ‘someone else’ afflicts some people to the point they can never be fully content with one person. I believe they are wrong and there is at least one ‘someone’, somewhere for everyone. I find inspiration, hope and even joy in the possibility of what Tom Hiddleston wrote:

When I love someone’s character, over time I’ll see that personality, I love so much, shining through their eyes and fusing with their appearance, turning them in the most beautiful girl in the world.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about someone’s beautiful, amazing, wonderful, fantastic personality, you’ll see every time you look at her.

It’s about the fact that when you look in her eyes, you just feel home…

You forget all your problems, all your fears, you just feel safe, you feel like you’ve finally found a place where you belong…

A place you can spend an eternity, where you will spend an eternity, cause those enchanting, beautiful eyes will slow down time and make every second; looking in her beautiful eyes, right into her amazing personality, last more than a lifetime.

It’s about the fact that the whole world, the whole universe just looks so much more beautiful!

All of a sudden everything looks different and your heart will just start smiling.

That’s what love is all about… the moment someone you only “liked” before, changes into the most aesthetically pleasing girl in the world.

The moment you realize how blind you’ve been all those days, how you were living in a fake universe, never knowing that the only thing your life is all about, the only thing that keeps you smiling, was all the time right next to you.

I am grateful my youthful heart is still alive in this middle-aged body and capable of appreciating, even feeling joy, at just reading such words. Truly blessed am I to be so open to love.


My whole body sank forward into his arms.
His lips moved against mine, exploring my mouth so gently.
I tried to mimic his movements–slowly,
uncertainly, until I didn’t have to think about it at all.
It just felt right. He cupped his hands behind my head,
pulling me closer until I couldn’t tell where my mouth ended
and his began. A liquid sensation swooped throughout my stomach.
It was the most amazing thing I’d ever felt
and it kept growing,
the vibrating heat expanding outward.
I was surprised I was still able to stand.
Heather Anastasiu

A Common Search for the Good and the Beautiful

/ James Browning

I have limited personal proof that what is below is in practice what makes for a good marriage. But the words feel perfectly true and seem to speak clearly of how it could be, should be.

Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens.
A good marriage must be created.
In the art of marriage the little things are the big things…
It is never being too old to hold hands.
It is remembering to say “I love you” at least once a day.
It is never going to sleep angry.
It is at no time taking the other for granted;
the courtship should not end with the honeymoon,
it should continue through all the years.
It is having a mutual sense of values and common objectives.
It is standing together facing the world.
It is forming a circle of love that gathers in the whole family.
It is doing things for each other, not in the attitude
of duty or sacrifice, but in the spirit of joy.
It is speaking words of appreciation
and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways.
It is not looking for perfection in each other.
It is cultivating flexibility, patience,
understanding and a sense of humor.
It is having the capacity to forgive and forget.
It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow.
It is finding room for the things of the spirit.
It is a common search for the good and the beautiful.
It is establishing a relationship in which the independence is equal,
dependence is mutual and the obligation is reciprocal.
It is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner.
It is discovering what marriage can be, at its best.
“The Art of Marriage” by Wilferd A. Peterson originally published in 1962

The majority of my married years were spent wishing I wasn’t someone’s husband. It’s ironic that now being single for five years I sometimes wish that was not my status. Was I a good husband? Sort of, kinda, sometimes and ‘not’ with regularity. It’s a lesson that loneliness and lost love have taught well. Gratitude is strong within for that hard learned knowing.

The trouble is not that I am single
and likely to stay single,
but that I am lonely
and likely to stay lonely.
Charlotte Bronte