A LITTLE BIT OF US...

Hey there! How’ve you been all week? Bet time took its own sweet while whiling itself away while you waited for rules two to last, for a love that will last, to show up… Yeah, yeah, the puns are terrible, but the rules still work, so step over them please and meet the rules that will make you look at love, yes even your love, in a whole bright new light. Last week we bumped into rule one like an old friend in a strange city. This week, meet rule two…Get yourselves a shared past… that has shaped you!

Folks, whoever told you that there was something called love at first sight doesn’t know a thing about love. It’s the mother of all myths, and she is unhappy and single. There’s no such thing as love at first sight. Lust, yes, curiosity sure and maybe even intrigue… I will give you that too, but you can’t love what you don’t know, and you definitely cannot love someone you don’t understand. And acquiring understanding, like most good things in life, takes time. It needs to see the seasons, live through the hail and rain and the dark, the freezing mornings and the blazing afternoons, and then if it’s still soft and fresh, full of colour and life, and not shriveled and dry and dead, then you know what you have is love and not just a dead daisy, which by the way, and at the expense of writing an irresponsibly long sentence that makes me look inarticulate and silly, I must say is what you would be left with, and I meant the daisy, not true love, if you did believe in love at first sight, and chose to act on that belief. For the record, at first sight, the woman I’m married to thought I was a painful arrogant show-off who she couldn’t bear to go beyond a ‘hi!’ with. That was 32 years ago and if you ask her, she might insist that not much has changed, but come on, look at us… Evidently, her ‘first sight’ got it all wrong. Now I’m not denying that first sight could be a springboard to a wonderful fulfilling everlasting romance. It could be that spark that sets your heart afire, that first drop of golden sunshine that lights up your skies but hold on, it’s not the whole deal… you do need more than just that. So now that I’ve wasted your breath on what love is not, it is time I told you what is… And that is ‘a shared experience’. Love, like most other memorable monuments, needs a foundation and experiences, shared experiences, are both the foundation and the floors. The first hello, the second “…er….lunch?” and the third “no, I don’t dance… but could you teach me?”, are all experiences, but those are interchangeable. They are a part of every exploration. And I’m not talking about movies or dinners either, unless you’re making them together, and I mean real movies, and real dinners. You would know you’re on to something special only when those shared experiences start shaping your life and your persona. Take the aforementioned lady I share my life with for instance. She used to hate dogs. Everybody she’s grown up with has always told her how dangerous they are and how filthy they are and so she grew up to believe that the only dog she would ever touch would be a hot-dog. Then I came along, and since in my early feral years, the local pack of strays would baby-sit me while my parents were away at work, I grew up with a lot of love for dogs. We spent a lot of time exploring each other’s interests by turns and she would see me play with strays and pets, take them to hospitals if they got hit by a car or had a bad case of mange, and soon she began to realize that dogs ‘were people too!’. Today as I sit down to write this story, just beyond the laptop is a photo frame with a picture of the two of us with Dora, our Rottweiler… their relationship is cordial and I dare say, sprinkled with liberal helpings of affection. I bet every time she is on her own and looks at a dog, she thinks of me. Not the coolest association, you might say, but 15 years into a marriage, how many of you can claim that the love of your life will think of you and smile every time she is away from you and is reminded of something you share, eh? My closest friend has a business that his family strapped him to, to run. But what he really wants to do is take pictures of the world. Until not too long ago he had given up on his dreams of becoming a photographer and would just take hobby photos every other Sunday. But about a year ago, the light of his life lit up his dreams when she told him how much she enjoyed watching him take pictures, how happy he seemed when he had had a good shoot and I imagine a few other metaphors about how delectable he looked with a camera in his hand. And thanks to the little photo expedition dates he went on with his beloved, and all that she said on their drives back from those shoots, mark my words, you will hear of him, and his photos in the months to come. Another friend of mine used to be this monstrous thing in a school-dress, like one of those gamma radiation freaks imagined by those designers at Marvel Comics. I remember this photograph of hers with her family on holiday and there she is standing behind her parents looking like a pudgy double-chinned body-guard. She had given up on herself and was happy buying ‘large’ fits from the men’s section when one fine day, this statue of David’s in basketball shorts, a friend of hers who she would help out with his relationship issues, walked up to her in the community play ground after a basketball game and said “you’re so sweet. You should workout with me. Meet me at the gym tomorrow…?”She agreed. Days, weeks and months later, her shape and her life had changed forever. Today, she and David are the happiest couple I know, their lives intertwined inextricably by those shared experiences in the gym that transformed them and helped them find love and each other. And now let me reveal a naughty little secret, the real pay-off of having shared experiences. Believe it or not, but shared experiences that have shaped our lives act as, umm… er…. Ah well, I don’t know of a better way to put it… shared experiences are the invisible chastity belts of a relationship. There, I said it!

The way this works is that our shared experiences which have shaped our partner have now become a part of them. So there’s a little bit of me in my partner and vice versa. So if I become a little careless or take the relationship for granted, and my partner begins to drift away, and towards other people, our shared experiences will remind her of what we have shared. And indeed, if our shared experiences have been truly unique, and have indeed shaped her, then those experiences will remind her that what she has with me is irreplaceable and worth working on… And it’ll buy me time to get my act together and reassure her that what we have is still as beautiful and special as it used to be…

So shared experiences help us understand each other even as we help sculpt each other, within and without, become the glue that keeps us together, stops us from going astray and of course gives us something to look for in each other’s eyes and laugh about when we’re both wrinkled and gray. So go ahead, get yourselves a few life-changing experiences that will engrave a bit of each other on your respective souls and watch the happily ever-afters unfold. I will leave you to your new adventures now and silently retrace my steps.

Meanwhile, rule three shall wait for you, same place, same time, next week…