Scott Kamps
Mark Twain wrote, “Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”
My wife and I celebrated our silver anniversary last June; while I still have a long way to go to perfect love, I’ve unquestionably learned a few things about it.
New love, indeed, seems the swiftest of growths. Meeting my wife at 18 wasn’t love at first sight – for me, at least – but it wasn’t long before she went from nobody in my life to everything.
Percy Sledge nailed a universal aspect of love singing, “When a man loves a woman, Can't keep his mind on nothin' else, He'd trade the world, For the good thing he's found, If she is bad, he can't see it…”
This twitterpated love (watch Bambi) is swift; it’s when one “can’t help falling in love.”
C.S. Lewis rightly said, “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing." He described being in love as the explosion that moves a man and a woman to promise fidelity to each other. At 20 years old – on one of the happiest days of my life – I vowed before God and others to have and to hold a beautiful young woman as my wife, from that day forward “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
The daily choosing love and fidelity to this woman since then (with her daily love/fidelity to me) is where love is the slowest of all growths – and the deepest and most meaningful. We started out poorer, with not much more than “green eyes and a heart of gold.”
But we’ve been blessed with more health than sickness in our shared life and more better days than worse. The best of our days for the last quarter century involve filling our lives with people who we’ve loved and who’ve loved us: the births of four biological children, adoption of our youngest son and fostering two daughters.
Our worst days have involved loss: my shop burning down, a Robert-the-Bruce type betrayal (watch Braveheart), and the death/burial of two daughters.
Through the highs and lows, the joys seemed doubled and the sorrows lessened – because they were experienced together.
It’s not just sharing the highs and lows of life that create deep connection.
If I’ve learned anything the last few weeks, it’s to savor life’s small moments. One great benefit of marriage has been many good old-fashioned, home-cooked meals, but it’s easy to take for granted the chair to my left at the dinner table isn’t empty. She’s always at my side; I hear her voice every day.
Those mundane moments in the midst of the extremes of life happening day after day, week after week and year after year, slowly grow into a deep – almost perfect – love.
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.