Love

I love love.  I love the way it can sneak up gently. Graze your skin like the wind. Or ignite you as if you slid slowly down a plume of fire. The way it makes you smile unexpectedly because you think of something said to you, or the way someone reached across the table and brushed the hair out of your eyes.  I love how love can make you suddenly put on perfume everyday, wear red lipstick, or check email more often and certainly more earnestly than normal. I love how love can make you buoyant. Make you dance. Give you swagger. Make us giggle. I love how love can make you suddenly declare this is our song or create a personal mental memorial to a certain bench at a certain park. I love how it can make us take ourselves less seriously. Open our hearts.  See the world through a lens of everything is possible.

I love love and I was smitten with you, JMac, from the initial conversation.

The photo of us snapped the night we got engaged demonstrates without a doubt, one of those moments when your heart gets completely entangled and the outcome of that entanglement shines through your countenance. 

Marriage is the piece of my life in which I strive the hardest to be successful. And I should. And I hope I always do. We have learned a significant amount about each other, and ourselves, as well as how hard and how easy marriage can be.  

And from the beginning to the day we stood in front of our families and closest friends, we promised to fully participate in this relationship. To strive to really see one another. To never assume we know everything about each other.

It is about sharing our lives without losing ourselves. To listen when we are chock full of opinions. To be kinder than a busy day, a monstrous workload, the terrible traffic tells us we need to be. To be amiable. To smile. And sometimes, it is just as simple as being a smart ass when a situation needs levity. And not being a smart ass when the situation won't be improved by it.

And it is about living fully, experiencing everything we can, laughing (including laughing at ourselves at times), and being adaptable when in fact, we don't always want to be. And not only are we doing our best, our best gets better every year. And I appreciate we spend a great bit of time trying to make things easier for one another. 

And I promised you I would treat your love in my life as a gift. And I hope you have felt truth in such a sentiment. I strive to live like that because I never want to consider our relationship in retrospect and think, Wow, we perpetually took that for granted. Nor do I want to one day sit across from you and ask ourselves, what happened to us?

You have given me perspective, support, love, patience, and inarguably one of the coolest children on Earth.

My entire life made a significant gain the day we met. I didn't think a thing was missing until that very first week we dated when we recognized a simple encounter would entirely change the course of our lives.

And every day I get to wake up and love you, I am grateful. 
I am so happy you asked. I am so glad I said yes. Happy Anniversary. I look forward to celebrating this weekend.