Love: 10 years of it

janae and joseph

 

You know what makes life delicious? Like eating the best dessert in the world, & you don’t want it to end, kind of delicious?

Love. Straight-up, unadulterated love.

I’m not talking lust, one-night stands, or even the act of falling in love. I’m talking true love. The kind that makes you want to have a family & follow a person to the ends of the earth just so you can be with them.

Joseph & I celebrated our 10 year anniversary last month.

Joseph has been gone for nearly a month now for training out of state, as a part of his job as an attorney for the U.S. Air Force.

He does a lot of things, but one thing he does is prosecute the bad guys. Drug dealers, rapists, & other miscreants. It’s super sexy. I mean, he goes off in his blues, & fights for justice, goodness. Much like Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men, except way hotter.

A week ago I sent him the following email:

Any idea where my 10 & 15 pound kettlebells are? I can’t find them anywhere. I have no idea how something that heavy & big could just disappear.

Janae

His response:

I have no response to your kettle bell question.  I wanted to write an email to you and just found it a little entertaining to do that as a response to this email.  I do wish that I had the answer for you.

So, in case I have failed to convey this very well, I miss you very much and spend most of my free time thinking of you.

I know you’ve got it hard right now.

I wish there was more that I could do, beyond just sympathizing.  I don’t imagine my little pep talks to you or the children have been terribly compelling.  I’m sorry that I’m way out here.  I wish you were with me.  It’s pretty here, though still rather hot.

I just wanted to remind you that I feel you, across this great expanse.

I feel you, like a point of light and warmth across a dark, cool forest, pulling me back home.

I feel you, and the kids feel you, and though they fight you and can be quite difficult, I know they love you and appreciate you.  I just need to work harder in explaining that they don’t get to fight you or question you, and they definitely don’t get to talk back to you.  So, I’ll work on training them better on those points.

I miss you.  I miss your smile and your laugh, and I especially miss being the cause of your smile and laugh.  I can’t wait to come home and be with you, in every sense.

I heard a song, and maybe it is a little cheesy, but I liked it, and wanted to put the link here to it, but couldn’t quite figure that out.  But I do want you to pull it up and listen to it, as a message from me to you.  Just go to YouTube, and look up “SafetySuit – Never Stop (wedding version).” There are all sorts of remakes, but to just here the song, go to the one that is posted by James Collins and has like 1.6 million views.  I’d like to hold your hands and dance with you (let’s go dancing!), but for now just listen to it without me.

That’s it for now, mostly because I’m typing this on my iPod, which has become quite laborious.

I love you X infinity, pretty lady.  I’ll see you soon.

Joseph

 

Let’s be clear. I’m not a mushy person. I’m a pragmatist.

Growing up my older sister played the role of love-chasing romantic & I was the complete opposite (she was convinced for awhile that I just didn’t like boys).

The truth was, I hadn’t met any yet that interested me. There were no boys worth my time (up to that point)–I found the great majority of them uninteresting, & poor conversationalists. So when I met Joseph, & we had that first unexpected conversation (that lasted three hours), it was very clear to me that I just wanted to be with him–forever.

Life is hard, but marriage, for us, is not hard.

Not because marriage isn’t a lot of work (it is!), but because we like & respect each other, we talk as much as we can, whenever we can, & we do all in our power to make the other one feel loved & appreciated.

And that friends, is what makes love so delicious.

//

P.S. Here’s the video for the song:

And about those kettlebells, turns out, my sons thought it would be cool to wrap them up in a bunch of blankets as part of a fort. Go figure.
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