I was on Twitter this morning, and found a tweet from @MarriageBeSaved: “Marriage is not a long date. It’s a partnership involving give-and-take and sacrifice.” I retweeted it and someone replied, “Sounds like a business deal, it’s about love?!” And that got me thinking.

I met my husband face-to-face 5 years and 2 days ago. We still love each other and want to spend time with each other. And to me, that says a lot. But it’s more than love. We LIKE each other.  For me, marriage isn’t a business deal, and its more than love. It is work, and commitment, and compromise, and flexibility, and anger, and friendship, and irritation, and happiness, and frustration, and contentment, and caring, and nagging, and laughing, and crying, and sharing, and liking, and growing, and whole bunch of other “ands”. That’s a marriage kind of love.

Marriage is an institution that needs to encompass business – just look at the statistics that say most marriages fail over money issues. Marriage can encompass love – but it doesn’t have to. To me, marriage is more than love, more than money, more than a lot of things. I wrote my Love Definition….oh I don’t know….probably 20 years ago. It helped me to not settle into a marriage just because I wanted to get married. It helped me to wait and find the right person for me. I waited 38 years to meet my husband, and I’m so glad I waited.

So that’s my lead-in to my Love Definition. This is what I wrote back then, in one take, with no editing. I’ve never needed to edit it – it says it all for me. So much so that I read it at our wedding.

Love Definition

I’m not talking about some grand perfect fairy tale illusion of romance. I’m talking about the person that you love enough to realize that you won’t always love them every single day – but you’ll always be willing to fight for the next day when you will love them again. The person that will make the memories and history with you, so that on the days when love isn’t there, you stay together, knowing that what you have is deeper than love. That you will fall in love with the person they are constantly changing into, and that they will love the new you. A day-to-day struggle that you willingly enter into knowing that it’s not love that holds you together, but love (or the continual promise of it) that makes you fight and believe that you will be together. That’s what I want, someone to fight, on a daily basis, for the love that we will share over the years, and for our memories and history that we make in our day-to-day lives.

Me and Jimmy on our wedding day 10-22-05