Love Stories

My two greatest loves

I am perhaps influenced by how many articles I'm reading recently devoted to love, or perhaps I have been doing the thinking on my own. I can't tell anymore.  But wherever it comes from, I am finding myself compelled to reflect on my relationships and my happiness and to share this joy.  I have been reading about the physiological importance of kissing and holding hands as part of healthy marriages, of the importance of touch for a baby's and child's learning, and about the importance of emotional stability for one's own success.

I usually hate Valentine's Day and the commercialism behind it but I am getting a little behind the idea of the holiday this year just as a way to encourage some meditation on the good things in life and a way to jump start the positivity I want to bring into my everyday life.  Enough of this stress that holds me in its clenched fist.  Right??

I've been wanting to tell the story of how Ben and I met, and I'll try to keep it brief.  This is one of my meditations on love.
Ben and I met in Melinda Hedgecorth's flamenco class in Seattle in March 2004.  I was taking her dance classes after not dancing for seven or eight months, and Ben was accompanying them on guitar after not doing classes for quite a while.  I don't know if it was love at first sight, but pretty close.  I knew we'd connect, if not fall in love.  It was easy, and genuine, to talk to him before and after class and it felt like we were really becoming friends.  When he actually asked me for my number, in May, and asked me to see Eric and Encarna with him at the Capitol Club, I had to ask my friends at work the next day if they thought it was really a date.  Duh.

Since I already had plans to move to Wisconsin and live with my sister starting about a month later, I called Ben as soon as I figured out it was a date, to re-schedule our get-together for sooner.  How about tomorrow?  Yes.  By the time we did go to the Capitol Club a week later, I was in love and we had been spending every day together.

I left for Wisconsin four weeks later with the plan that Ben would come visit over the summer and see if he could get his own apartment and job.  I was sleeping in my sister's den, and we were looking for a new place to move ourselves.  The visit was a success and sure enough Ben came to Wisconsin around September and moved in to an apartment about ten blocks from our new place.  It was only a matter of months before we realized we were just wasting rent money having him live down the road, so he moved in to my bedroom with me and shared the apartment with my sister and her dog and cat.

We had a rough year in Wisconsin, but we were falling in love, totally self-obsessed.  We got engaged on our one-year anniversary after dinner at the restaurant where I was busing tables, and it was a totally planned engagement.  We had been talking about it, Ben spilled the beans that he'd bought me a ring, and frankly, I told my sister as soon as I got to Wisconsin that I'd be marrying him some day.  She didn't believe me at first.

We left for Spain a year after landing in Wisconsin, and I started grad school at NYU in Madrid that September.  Ben taught some English and took guitar lessons.  I'm so glad we were there for a year, and I sometimes wish we'd stayed longer but at the time we had several reasons for wanting to come back.  We planned a Seattle wedding at the Japanese Garden, with help from Ben's mom while we were abroad, and I bought my wedding dress with my mom in Boston on a trip to the States for some job interviews.  We took the marriage both very seriously and not at all seriously.  I think we were dedicated to the process of reflecting on our relationship and preparing for a new life, but I also think we knew that marriage in itself meant little to us and that we could decide to be un-married at any point it felt logical.  We did not connect the "marriage" to our deep love as directly as many do.

So the following summer, we moved back to the States, got married in Seattle, and then settled in Pennsylvania for my teaching job and it was perhaps the most intense summer of our lives, but it was also very real.  I felt like a grownup.  Slowly the domestic life expanded... a cat... a dog... planning the pregnancy... and not once did it end up feeling like a "sell-out" or the lame version of growing up that we all fear in our youth.  I think we stayed true to our passions and to our ideals pretty well.

We've moved back to Seattle, full circle, arriving the same summer our marriage filled five years.  We have had our fights over the years and we've pissed each other off but we also accept each other and love each other profoundly and we encourage each other and we find tiny ways to celebrate love and give thanks.  We are constantly trying to balance intimacy with space, passion with obligation, career with family, like anyone.  We will always be working at it.  We are starting out, yet again.  We are helping each other through the transition and we have each taken turns holding the other tear-streaked face on our shoulder.  Hopefully this has been one of our last major moves, and we can truly settle, and continue to travel and experience the world from a great home base.

If I didn't have Ben I don't know what I'd do.  I don't know how I'd keep my sanity in all this (job, baby, art).  Ben is a dedicated partner and open communicator. He's a wonderful dad, and I don't even think he knows how talented he is in this.  He is a dedicated stay-at-home dad and even though winters are hard, he pushes through and brings love and creativity to Hudson's expanding life.  And for my part, I am definitely still in love.