When love isn't about romance.

   

     When my husband and I were dating he told me he loved me first. My stomach didn't do flips or fill itself with butterflies. However my heart did fill with peace and I felt more loved than I had previously believed I deserved. He and I both knew that I wasn't ready to say that to him yet, so I just smiled, hugged him, and said "I know."

     In English we have one word for love…love. We have a few other words that mean similar things or are components of love, but love is the overarching word that we use to describe most good feelings.

     I'm a big fan of romance...but not in a Nicholas Sparks' love story, passion-filled sort of way. While we dated Kyle left notes on my doorstep almost every morning and melted my little heart. We had fun and enjoyed each other, but life also threw us some hard days. When we were engaged, we knew that getting married to each other was the best choice we could both make and we loved each other very much. We were happy, but life was hard. Since we’ve been married, we’ve had more joy than we both believed we could have or deserve, but we’ve also had our share of tough days.

     The truth is that joy and happiness didn’t just happen. We didn’t simply fall in love and become really happy because we were finally in love and all of the sudden it was all okay. We have found joy and happiness in our relationship because of the difficulties that we overcame separately and together. We are grateful for the hard days or weeks or months that we’ve had because when finally resolved, they have brought us closer than we ever could have been because of a few happy moments.

In the Greek language there are four words for love:

Eros is romantic or sexual love.
Philia is the kind of love between friends who take care of each other.
Storge is the love that a parent has for a child.
Agape is the kind of love that motivates us to improve another’s life.

     One way to jip yourself, your partner, and your relationship is to focus completely on eros. Love is and can be so much more than romance. It is about going to get some socks for your wife because her feet are cold. It is about rubbing your husband's back because he's had a really hard day. It is about letting your wife cry on your shoulder for the third time this week for a reason that even she doesn't know. It's about listening to your spouse share their hurt feelings without taking personal offense. It's about digging a smile out of the one you love when things aren't going right for either one of you.

     Relationships are hard, marriage is hard, and most of all life is hard. We can't fix everything, but we can bring joy, peace, hope, and love to the ones whom we choose to love the most.