Difficulty
One year ago today, I posted to celebrate the birthday of my wife, the woman I love, the incomparable TempleViper.
I included the following line - "She's smart, funny, honest, ethical, and driven by fierce convictions." All of which is true, but when I first posted the entry I included the word "difficult" in that line. About an hour later I edited the post to remove the word, thinking it might hurt TempleViper's feelings... but she had already seen it.
When I got home that evening from work she asked me, "Why did you remove 'difficult'? It's true. I am."
And she is. And I guess that's worth a comment.
All relationships are difficult. All of them. I've never had a long-term - or sometimes even short-term - romantic relationship that didn't have some measure of difficulty, of challenge... sometimes minor things, sometimes major. People are just... like that. It had always seemed self-evident to me that such things were unavoidable and you needed to work through them in a partnership for your mutual good... but as the years went by I found that a great many people didn't think that way. And so partnerships ended, sometimes with a bang, sometimes a whimper, sometimes with a harried retreat to minimum safe distance.
That changed with TempleViper. She was, and is, willing to meet me halfway, as a partner. What was self-evident to me is to her as well. She is, like most any other person, including myself, not without her difficulties. But she's worth it. And seems to find me so, as well.
And now she is another year older, growing old along with me.
Happy birthday, sweetheart. You can be difficult. And I love you for it.
I included the following line - "She's smart, funny, honest, ethical, and driven by fierce convictions." All of which is true, but when I first posted the entry I included the word "difficult" in that line. About an hour later I edited the post to remove the word, thinking it might hurt TempleViper's feelings... but she had already seen it.
When I got home that evening from work she asked me, "Why did you remove 'difficult'? It's true. I am."
And she is. And I guess that's worth a comment.
All relationships are difficult. All of them. I've never had a long-term - or sometimes even short-term - romantic relationship that didn't have some measure of difficulty, of challenge... sometimes minor things, sometimes major. People are just... like that. It had always seemed self-evident to me that such things were unavoidable and you needed to work through them in a partnership for your mutual good... but as the years went by I found that a great many people didn't think that way. And so partnerships ended, sometimes with a bang, sometimes a whimper, sometimes with a harried retreat to minimum safe distance.
That changed with TempleViper. She was, and is, willing to meet me halfway, as a partner. What was self-evident to me is to her as well. She is, like most any other person, including myself, not without her difficulties. But she's worth it. And seems to find me so, as well.
And now she is another year older, growing old along with me.
Happy birthday, sweetheart. You can be difficult. And I love you for it.