Looking for Love
Love in Marriage: 365 Reasons I Love My Husband
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photo: Michael Gaida
If I have learned little else over the years, it is that marriage, like life, is made up of a thousand minor actions we take each day; some will be selfless and others will be selfish. because marriage is not just one moment, it is thousands of them, building our relationship, moving it at times forward, at times backwards. And in all of these moments, love is always a choice.
Whether it’s a date moment or a dirty dishes moment, whether it’s a romantic moment or a resentful moment, love is a choice, our choice. And I don’t know about you, but sometimes it’s easy to fall out of the habit of choosing love because let’s face it, sometimes love is not the easy choice. And we tend to like easy, don’t we? I know I do anyway.
But when we regularly search for small moments with and understated actions by our spouse, we soon discover choosing love is a habit we can develop. Like a muscle that gets regularly stretched, our relationship grows stronger by our choosing love even when it’s not the most obvious response. And that is what this project is really about — recreating that habit of choosing to love and finding it by looking for love in all of the places.
I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember Johnny Lee’s song, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, but that phrase can be interpreted differently than he intended in his song. I believe in marriage we need to look for love in all the right places and all the wrong places. In fact, we desperately need to choose love in the places where we feel we’ve been wronged or in the moments when our spouse has not acted as we would have (he’s not me, after all, is he?).
Reason 2 of 365: Coffee
That’s why I am going to spend time each day looking for the small things and I hope you’ll join me. For me, Reason 2 why I love my husband is because this morning, when he had to leave earlier than usual for his job and that left me with all the morning chores that have to be done, he took time before he left to make my coffee and refill my water.
