Hello again! Still madly “in like” after all these years!

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Wow, it has been so long since I last wrote a blog post here. I feel a little shy in coming back!

Well I came across this video on Facebook of this couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, and oh my goodness, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it:

This video is just a short snippet of course, and I don’t know these people.* My point is that there is no way I can categorically state that this video represents an accurate picture of the relationship between them. But all the same, I am convinced! To me, this video shows a couple who are still genuinely excited about one another, even after 25 years of marriage. There seems to be a light in the husband’s eyes with his broad smile as he beholds his wife which is also mirrored in her excitement towards him.
They seem to have a playfulness around one another and they both seem to be confident in the regard, admiration and respect that their spouse has for them. It seems to me that they both seem free to be themselves around one another, and that they each feel accepted by their spouse.

People might talk about the interaction between them as an expression of love, but I would rather talk about it as an expression of “like”. Commenting on the video on Facebook, I wrote that it seems that this couple genuinely like one another, and they genuinely like, or rather love, being married to one another.
Now obviously I know that people can put on an act, and this is after all a video that has undoubtedly been carefully edited to portray the couple and their marriage in the best possible light. But the way they interact with one another, they seem to have established cues between one another, where they respond so naturally to one another, and it is so easy to imagine that this is what they have been building for the last 25 years.

LORD, PLEASE GIVE ME A MARRIAGE LIKE THIS!!!! I pray that God will grant it to me and my future husband to genuinely like one another, to still be passionately “in like” with one another so many years down the line, as this couple so clearly are.

I was reflecting on it, and I was thinking that to sincerely, deeply like your spouse is such an important thing. I’ve always been confused by the notion of love when it comes to marriage. I find it much easier to understand the notion of liking your spouse. Perhaps for this reason: When you say you “love” your spouse, then that is something unique, or the way that you love your spouse is supposed to be unique. So then the question is this: what is unique about the way you think about your spouse or you interact with them to qualify it as love, or even more confusingly “true love”? And yet when you talk about liking someone, that does not necessarily need to imply something unknowably mysterious or unique. It is something that I’m sure most of us have experienced with a wide variety of friends or people of either gender. We know exactly what it means to like someone, because we have all experienced times when we like people, and conversely we have all experienced times when we dislike people!

Because “true love” is presented as being unique, or at least a lot less common than liking someone, we are not sure that we have experienced it. It then makes it easy for people to come and tell us that “true love is this…” which to me makes it all the more confusing.

Perhaps the most reliable understanding of marital love is this: instead of constantly evaluating your feelings to try to work out whether or not this is “true love”, focus rather on finding someone whom you genuinely like and respect, and are attracted to, and compatible with, and committing to them, working with them to consciously build a strong foundation for a lifetime together. I also believe that “true love” is built up day by day over the course of a marriage and is made up of hundreds of little kindnesses that you share with one another. Each kindness might not necessarily reflect how you naturally feel in the moment, and you sometimes have to go out of your way to think of something kind to say to your spouse or to make a sacrifice or to support your spouse through a period when they are behaving uncharacteristically. Over time all those things, and sacrifices big and small, add up to take your story from one of mutual attraction and “like” to undeniable “true love”.

Questions about liking: I was reflecting on this, and asking myself what it might look like in practice for someone to like me:
Does he smile when he thinks about me, or happily laugh to himself? Does he store up funny stories that he wants to share with me? Do his eyes light up when he sees me across a room? Does the thought of me genuinely fill him with joy? Does he genuinely appreciate who I am and what I stand for…or does he merely tolerate me? When he thinks about a situation, and imagines how I would handle it, does he chuckle to himself, thinking “I bet she would do this…I bet she would say that!”

It is truly so easy for me to imagine myself liking someone, and yet so much harder for me to imagine someone liking me. I know that men are easily attracted to me and my smile, but that someone would truly, deeply like me for my values…? If I’m honest I can be quite outspoken, and my primary consideration is not always likeability! This is just one clear example about how being a “strong independent woman” can often be at odds with a desire to get married.

To survive and thrive as a “strong independent woman” you are almost compelled to embrace certain traits such as being determined, hard-nosed, selfishly focused, and the online world refers to this as “leaning into your masculine energy”. Whereas there seems to be an admirable softness about this woman. And the thing is, I bet she’s highly successful in her own right, and yet she seems to have managed to hold onto her femininity and win the adoration of her husband while at it! Something else I love about this video is that she seems to allow him to be the man, to cherish her and she stands and accepts it all! I want to let you know Mr Huggie-Wuggie that I sincerely want this dynamic. However I don’t intuitively know how to do it so please be patient me.

So yes, this is a real lesson for me! Yes I am ambitious, and I never stop going on about it! But on the other hand I also want to be very happily married with a husband who adores me. So moving forward, I think I’m going to work on practising gentleness, and sweetness too (why are you laughing?!) The thing is that I would sincerely be both gentle and sweet all the time. However, I sincerely have not known how to be gentle and sweet while asserting my boundaries. However that is clearly something I have to work on!

I was also thinking that from henceforth I should actively look for marriage success stories to share on this blog, to balance out all the horror stories and negativity.

*Life in Nigeria is a very small world, so I’m sure that there are only a few degrees of separation between me and them.