For Valentine’s Day my wife, Helene, came up with a wonderful idea. She said, “Why don’t we each sit down and write each other a love letter?” I agreed completely that this was an awesome idea. Helene and I tell each other that we love each other every day and while I believe this is a great practice we are not in the practice of telling each other why we love each other. For us men, we too often like to think of Valentine’s Day as a day that we buy our wife chocolates and/or flowers and take them out to a nice restaurant while neglecting to share with her the reasons that we cherish her so much.
This Valentine’s Day my wife and I stayed home and had a simple but delicious dinner that was a team effort. Helene made her mom’s famous red-pepper soup and I made marble-cream-cheese brownies for dessert. Of course I did splurge for a dozen orange roses because my wife is worth it. The highlight of this romantic evening though was sitting at the dinner table and reading my love letter to Helene. This was more than reading a letter though. It was a declaration of why I chose her and made a commitment to spend the rest of my life with her. Just as paramount as reading my letter was listening to Helene as she declared her love and commitment to me when she read hers!
Neither Helene nor I are completely comfortable sharing our letters here but we believe that putting them out there may help other couples to go beyond the potentially hollow declaration of, “I love you” and put some meat behind those words. Our prayer is that your relationships push you to love more…to love deeper…to love when it hurts!
MY LETTER TO HELENE:
To the love of my life Helene,
You know, I love the fact that it is so easy for us to say “I love you” to each other every day! While I believe that we mean those words every time that we say them to each other they can become hollow if we cannot express reasons why.
I often think about how our relationship started and am pretty amazed about how it all came together. Ironically, it all started with a selfish act on my part—I remember being at Rocky Island and asking if you were riding with anyone to Cheat Fest later that week. I remember wanting to share gas money being the primary motivation for the question. Believe it or not, while you were not a total stranger at the time, it was still incredibly uncharacteristic for me to ask such a question and I am sort of baffled as to where the motivation to do so came from—I am confident I could have found another male paddling friend to share gas money with. That makes me sort of think that it was Divine intervention that had me ask the question.
I remember the e-mail from you the day before sharing our ride. You stated, “Food is important to me.” That makes me think of two things that I love about you. First, you are not afraid to speak your mind and share your needs—namely in this instance, “hey, I don’t know this person and they may be one of those fast-food junkies. I need to know that because I like to eat healthy and make arrangements if that is the case.” Second, I am not one of those fast-food junkies and I loved that before we were even in the car on the way to the Cheat River I had discovered that we both have a love of food in common. By the way, it was awesome that we had a team effort with the Chili the other night—you did a great job with the carrots and peppers! That acknowledgment leads me into yet another thing I love about you and us. You frequently say, “We make a great team.” I believe that is so true—I love when we go paddle together and often when we come home there is little or no verbal communication and yet everything gets put away—I love that you hang my gear for me!
Well anyway, I wanted to continue with the story of our “birth” as a couple. This is kind of crazy, but I can’t remember anything about the day of our trip together to the Cheat River prior to our car ride or to put it another way I can’t remember a single thing about that day where you were not present in it. I can’t remember if I worked that day and took off early or if I took the entire day off. I can’t remember if I picked you up or if we met at my house! Two things from that day stick out more than others though--the fact that we had a great conversation during our three hour car ride and that we had an impromptu dinner that felt very much like a date. I also remember me telling you that I had the impression that you were shallow…whoops! Thankfully, that was a false impression!
What sticks out to me today from our car ride to the Cheat River is another thing that I love about you and that is the fact that you listen well. I am still a little embarrassed at myself for how self-absorbed I have been for the past month or two and even then you listened for several hours while I spat out and berated a book that I had recently read.
This is somewhat ironic but I rarely ever think about the fact that we both won our classes at the race that year—as a matter of fact I was thinking about the dinner after the race and what we can dub “the brownie incident,” for lack of a better term, when I was like, “Oh yeah, we raced that Friday and we both won.” That is such an afterthought for me and that is really odd, because you know how competitive I am. Anyway, you have this huge, giving heart and I was literally blown away by your simple gesture of buying milk for the brownie I had saved.
Just last night I was sharing with XXXX about how I am so reluctant to involve myself in the mess of other people’s lives, but that you jump in with both feet. You have had more conversations with XXXXX than I have. XXXXX talks to you more than he talks to me about his issues, the same with XXXXX. You lend a listening and loving ear to XXXXX. I am so fortunate that I get to learn this from you—I have a great model to learn from with respect to what it means to be there for another—I have a long way to go with this, but because of you I really believe that God is creating growth in my life in this area!
I could write more about the weekend that God brought us together, but I don’t want to dwell on the past too much. As you can see, I merely wanted to use that weekend as a back drop for what I love about you today. That does not mean that I do not like to think about how we met—it gives me joy and puts a smile on my face to think about it, but we are almost five years removed from that weekend and we should live in the present. I believe we are both far from those two people we were back then and I think that is a good thing!
You are also a lot better than me at asking for help! You had 20 people lined up to helps us move and I essentially moved the entire house by myself while you were away in Nepal. I think a lot of people would ask, “What is there to love about someone not being afraid to ask for help?” I mean this can put a huge burden on the other spouse having to help out all the time—I believe this to be somewhat true, but I think the converse of this is way more detrimental to a relationship. The prospect of living parallel lives is so very high with someone who never asks for help. Asking for help allows the other to share the burden and that is a big part of what marriage is. This is something that you are so much better at than me and again I love that I get to learn a new skill that will help develop humility in me and deepen not just our relationship but all of them.
Another thing that I love about you is that there are times when you disagree with me. These are never fun times. However, this is one of the biggest things that I love about you. There is such a danger to a husband or wife that will always take the side of their spouse. I am going to guess that it is not fun for you either when you disagree with me. This makes me ever more thankful that you are willing to do so. Disagreeing with me is an act of love that takes effort and it holds me accountable and I love that you are willing to make yourself uncomfortable in this respect.
I love our wedding invitation quote and my prayer for us is that we live it. I love that I married you because I believe we complement each other well—we do make a good team! I also pray that I carry traits that you can learn from as well. Getting back to our wedding invitation quote I have to be honest about the fact that I have never devoted it to memory—I always remember the gist of it, but I wanted to include it here so I had to search for it on-line. I found it with a continuation and I wanted to end with it:
The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. We marry to assist each other in this larger task. Though we should indeed love our spouse with true satisfaction, the most selfish and hateful life of all is that of two beings who unite merely in order to enjoy pleasures. The highest calling is that of the man who has dedicated his life to serving God and doing good, and who unites with a woman in order to happily further that purpose.
HELENE’S LETTER TO ME:
My sweetheart, the love of my life, my greatest blessing,
One of the things that I noticed about you right off the bat was that you truly care about relationships in a way that most guys do not. You think through what is going on between you and another person (friend, family ...) and you are self-aware enough to be honest about where the road blocks might be even if they come from you. For example you had thought about why you had a hard time staying close with friends who moved away. Maybe you didn’t magically start rekindling a bunch of lost friendships, but you took the time to diagnose why it was an issue for you and eventually you were able to turn things around (e.g., when XXXX moved, you didn’t feel so abandoned anymore). Just the fact that you spend any time at all considering the status of your many relationships with others is hugely attractive for me because relationships are such a major part of my world.
I love that you are such a good listener - maybe not when you get all focused on your stuff but when you decide to listen, you are a very active listener that not only makes me feel heard, but also helps me think through stuff by having to answer your questions that help further my understanding of the issue. I really love that about you, you are a real friend to me in that respect, not just a lover.
The fact that you are a seeker spiritually is something that means a lot to me. I could never be with someone who thinks he has all the answers and isn’t willing to continue seeking and trying to understand the world both spiritual and real. You work so hard at understanding God and how you can serve him better, as well as at understanding the world around us and how you can make a difference. That is very inspiring to me and motivates me to do the same even if my focus might be slightly different than yours. I don’t know where all this seeking will lead us in the long run, but it’s the journey that matters and I love being on this journey with you!
I absolutely love how much you show your love by cooking. It’s not just that I am the lucky recipient of much of that love (although that is a significant bonus since “food is important to me”), it’s that I love watching you spend so much time and energy doing something for someone else. It gives a glimpse into how big your heart is for others and that makes me melt inside. Other bonus: I get the pride of watching you impress my dad :)
I feel very humbled and very touched that you share some of your insecurities with me, like for example the fact that you feel that you are not “smart” like a lot of NCCers. I disagree with that statement but I recognize that your feelings of inferiority in this matter are real to you and I also know that this is not something you’d openly share with everyone. So I am grateful for your self-awareness and honesty. We all feel insecure in some ways and a lot of these insecurities probably seem crazy to others – the art of marriage often feels like finding the balance between trusting the other enough to share our insecurities and having the other be mindful and respectful but without enabling us to stay stuck in the swamp of insecurity.
I am so touched that you have embraced all my friends, of which there are many and who can be a little overwhelming at times both in numbers and in personalities. This is important to me because as you know my love for my friends is something that takes up a big part of my heart and my daily preoccupations (not to mention scheduling), so when you show acceptance of my friends and even real love for some of them you actually make me feel accepted and loved myself. My friends are important to me so you caring about them translates to you caring about ME and that feels very good. As time goes on, of course, friendships have become lesser priorities for me than our marriage, but nevertheless they are still very important and I love that you honor that.
I love traveling with you! I love that you are patient with the small delays and unexpected surprises that are inherent to traveling (particularly internationally) and that you are interested in learning about other cultures and people living in ways different than ours, and that you rejoice in seeing amazing landscapes (like the Grand Canyon) as much as I do. Being able to share my love of traveling and of the outdoors with someone is one of my biggest joys in our marriage.
Another thing I am really grateful for is how well we work as a team in our home. I am no longer as afraid or anxious about opening up our home to our friends or even strangers because you work so hard to help me put the house back in order immediately after we have gatherings. Knowing that I can count on you to do that with me alleviates a lot of my anxiety about the mess that results from having guests, and in turn that makes me more willing and even excited to open up our home to others. I love our teamwork!
I would be remiss if I focused only on emotional or intellectual attributes… your body is such a source of deliciousness to me. I never get tired of how smooth and wonderful your skin is and I could just spend all day with my skin against your skin just breathing you in and feeling like I could melt into you. I am so grateful that you work hard to stay healthy and fit so that we can enjoy each other physically as much as is possible. And you smell soooo good!!!
And finally, I am excited (both eager and anxious) to see where God is going to lead us. After a couple of years of you doing a lot of thinking and reading on the issue of poverty and how to help those in need, it seems that you are reaching a time of action with committing to Second Saturday and the Living in the Tension group. It scares me a little as would anything that could potentially alter the way we live our lives (which I am very comfortable with and really enjoy), but it is also a powerful and exciting experience to be joined as One with someone and see him taking a path that I value and admire and feel like I am going along for the ride… I am not used to not being the sole master of my own destiny but there is a deep sense of righteousness in being by your side and supporting you in whatever comes next!
