To a lot of people, love is the big things. It's the grand proposals and the fancy dinners. It's the flowers and the phone calls. Does he buy you jewelry? Does she always let you go out with the boys on Friday night? Are they everything you ever dreamed of and more?
There are a multitude of articles on how to keep him satisfied and how many date nights a month are ideal. You could spend a lifetime researching how to have the perfect relationship on Pinterest. Most of those articles have to do with what to give who and when.
But I don't think it is. After watching the great love stories of my life, my parents and my grandparents, who were together longer than they were apart, I think it's something else entirely. They did not have grand proposals and fancy dinners. What they had were dates to car repair shops and drive-thru joints. They got flowers on occasion. Phone calls did happen, certainly. Jewelry was rare and nights out were even more scarce.
What they had was each other and that was more than enough for them. They had the best time no matter where they were, as long as they were with each other. They had what everyone seems to be looking for and they taught me that it is not found in the loud, flamboyant displays so common today. It’s in the quiet everyday things people do for each other.
It's bringing your wife her orange juice and vitamins every morning when you both are eighty because you know she forgot. It's baking your wife a birthday cake and icing it yourself as a surprise. It's a phone call on the way home from work just to talk about your day. It's fixing your husband his favorite thing for supper when he had a bad day.
It's the little things. The big things are easy to remember and even easier to do. The little things have to come with effort and time. Love the way it is supposed to be expressed in a relationship is a lot of little decisions all stacked together. It is you saying life is more about them than it is about you.
In today’s world, that is hard. We have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the list goes on, telling us it should be about us. We take selfies and post updates about our day. We wait for people we don’t even know to like, and share, and comment, on our social media posts to say it is about us. We want someone to choose us, but we hesitate strongly when it comes to choosing someone else.
It is never about us, at least not in all the ways that it matters. Do not stop choosing the other people in your life. That is the most important thing I have learned. Love is a choice and you have to choose it every single day. That is what makes it real and long lasting.
