Love Is Not Love . . .
On Saturday, imbibed with joie de vivre, which always comes with spring weather, I asked my husband for a hammer and some finishing nails. Our girls followed me around. The seven-year-old asked, “What’re you doing?”
“I’m about to revolutionize this house.”
“What does rev-o-lution-ize mean?”
I smiled around a nail. “It means I’m going to put some holes in the wall.”
In the breezeway, I made myself a hat wall, then I hung a few more items around the house. It was addicting. I started looking around for another excuse to use the hammer. I found the shadow box picture my best friend’s parents had made as our wedding gift.
I cherish this shadow box, but I hadn’t hung it up for the same reason I hadn’t hung up many pictures. We’re living in an apartment adjacent to my husband’s warehouse, and because this is temporary (and because we’ve moved a lot in the past five years), I didn’t have it in me to hang up a lot of pictures. But then spring came. Rebirth. Hope awakening.
By George, it was time to put some holes in the wall.
The shadow box featured our wedding invitation with a few sprays of fall flowers, which called to mind that Indian Summer day we said I do.
Because this was, of course, before children, I’d spent a ridiculous amount of time creating this wedding invitation by choosing the right font, ribbon color, and words.
Now, I couldn’t even see those words. I cleaned dust from the glass and the beautiful handmade frame, and I was shocked to see that I still couldn’t read the invitation.
It had faded. The gilt had worn off. Tilting the shadow box, I read the sentences by reading the font’s engraving. Honestly, after ten and a half years, I couldn’t even remember what they said.
Then I read and had to smile at the naivety of that twenty-one-year-old girl who’d been prophesying and didn’t even know it:
“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O no! It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
I hadn’t found that sonnet through the author, William Shakespeare. I’d found it through Sense and Sensibility—the movie, not the book. There’s this one climactic scene where Marianne’s standing on a knoll, quoting this, while the rain lashes her.
At twenty-one, I’d related a lot to Marianne’s impulsive, headstrong nature. Now, I liked to think I leaned more towards her sister: the calm, collected Elinor (unless you give me a hammer and some finishing nails).
But standing in our apartment while reading that faded verse, I found that my heart swelled with the realization that my husband and I have experienced over ten years of “alterations”—some not so large, others nearly catastrophic—and yet we are still together.
More than that, he has truly become my best friend.
What if I had given up when I was a lonely newlywed who didn’t feel “fulfilled” working in his grocery store? What if I had given up when we had our firstborn daughter, and it took such effort to connect? What if I had given up when we moved to Wisconsin and so many hard and holy things fell into place so quickly? What if we had given up when we moved home?
Walking down the hallway with the shadow box, I went over to the wall next to our bed. I pressed the tip of the nail against the drywall and hammered it in. Hanging up the picture and standing back, I could read those words more clearly due to the natural light falling through the window.
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .
The reason my husband and I love each other more now than ever is not because we have learned to love each other perfectly, but because we have learned to trust the One who holds us through life’s alterations and tempests.
How have you grown in the past ten years?
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