Everybody wants to know how to find true love, but what about finding it and keeping it while raising children? So far, our love has endured the test of time, from building and then losing a dream house together to the trials and tribulations of raising boys in “paradise.”
After watching writer Mandy Len Catron’s TED talk, it came to me that the subject of my blog, and perhaps my book, should be whether it’s possible to make true love last, especially after having children.
Len Catron spoke about psychologist Arthur Aron’s theory that 36 specific questions plus four minutes of sustained eye contact are a recipe for falling in love, or at least for creating intimacy between complete strangers. Finding the questions online, she decided to test them with an acquaintance, and guess what? They fell in love.
When she posted her story, she didn’t consider how viral a topic “the key to love” would be, nor did she foresee the problems of exposing her relationship with her boyfriend to hundreds of thousands of people. She became disillusioned by the attention, concerned that people were more interested in how long her love would last than in what the key ingredient was to making it last.
What Keeps Us Together
That gave me pause in the days before our 17th anniversary. We had our oldest boy almost exactly a year after our wedding day, and the ebb and flow of our love has always been vulnerable to financial stress, societal obstacles and natural forces that get thrown our way at unexpected moments. Toss in three baby boys who morph into dirty, rambunctious, awkwardly cool teens who look like adults on the outside while their frontal lobes are formed only enough for them to take risks with their lives, and you have the makings of love gone sour.
Ultimately, it’s best if we aren’t feeling life’s pressures at the same time, so one of us can hold the torch and be the grounding force while the other slips off to crumble, twitch and hover in some dark place until ready to grab the outstretched hand and be coaxed back with humor, understanding and a whole lotta love, petting and affection.
If I had to name the key ingredients, I’d say it all comes down to mutual respect and treating each other with as much love, tenderness and integrity as possible. Admittedly, I have my moments when my mind wanders to how life could be different, easier, had I met somebody who was more my mentor than my equal, who shared my religion and who had a whole lot more money. But in the end, a magnetic attraction to one another, the ability to make each other laugh hard when the chips are down and unadulterated loyalty are what have kept us together. (And in the end, the answer is… sex!)
As with everything, our world has opened up so completely by having children, but it is one heck of a payoff.
