A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day

Andre Maurois

Romantic love has often been the primary focus of movies, songs and novellas for as long as they’ve existed. And they continue to be so.

We love seeing the hero and the heroine fight all odds and finally get their happily ever after.

We love those portrayals of cozy hand-in-hand walks on the beach against the backdrop of a dreamy sunset.

We love “LOVE”. It is after all, the one thing all of us are after- be it in the form of appreciation, recognition or belonging.

I have always been in love with ‘love’. My notion of love was quite stereotypical. Love meant finding ‘The One’-the only person who could complete me; Someone who would rescue me from the agony of a lonely existence and colour my sky a bright shade of baby-blue.

The ‘Falling in love” part is the poster child of love. The reckless abandon and passion thats the courtesy of this stage of love (thanks to dopamine highs ofcourse!) is what we love seeing in the movies and singing songs about.

As we just celebrated our wedding anniversary with our almost-five year old child, my concepts of love have metamorphosed over the past seven years of being together.

Falling in love is beautiful. Period.

But growing in love is what makes love even more beautiful, every single day.

After the veil of those early days of idealization has been lifted from our eyes, we start seeing our partner for all that he is. A flawed human being just like us. Someone who’s still finding the way, just like us. Someone with quirks and so many little things that annoy us. Someone real and not the figment of imagination that we had been dreaming up since we were thirteen.

And they see us for what we are. That we aren’t perfect; That we make stupid mistakes and blame them for it, that we can be lazy and unkind and selfish; That we are far from the angel we once pretended to be. And they still stay.

And we keep choosing each other every single day.

We learn new things together ( like investing in Mutual funds or healthy quinoa recipes).

We figure out why we react a certain way in a given situation (mostly childhood patterns).

At the end of a miserable 12 hour day doing a fellowship, we know we can unpack our burdens with them.

They have promised to be there for us and we have promised them our lives.

Making love work and making love last is a lifelong endeavor. Its hard work and it requires us to keep growing as individuals too. Its about turning towards each other even when we’ve been hurt and creating a shared meaning of life. Its unpacking arguments and crafting a secret code incomprehensible to the world.

Six years back, as I unwrapped a wedding gift -a pretty golden box with heart shaped ear rings, I noticed a handwritten message on the inside of the lid-

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

Sure, falling in love is as exhilarating as it is made out to be, but growing in love is even better.

N.B- Read this book if you want to make your marriage better!