Modern Day Romance

This week's GBE2 prompt is "Romance".  I haven't written a post from the weekly prompt in quite some time, but whenever love comes up, I just can't help myself.

I know I ramble on and on about how much I love my husband and how wonderful our marriage is, and yada yada yada.  I also know some folks get tired of hearing it.  If you fall into that category, sorry for your luck cuz I won't ever stop talking about my hubby or our relationship. It is one of the things I am most proud to be a part of.  We're not perfect, and our marriage isn't without frustrations and speed bumps, but it's pretty amazing, I won't lie.

One of the challenges I had early in our relationship was what I perceived to be a lack of romance.  Oh, there was love, and there was lovin', and there were even sweet happenings along the way.  But all the fairy tale stories tell us that there should be these grand romantic gestures that sweep us girls off our feet.  They tell us that is the only way we'll know that our significant other truly loves us.  As a grown woman who has been married twice and has spent the last 7 years with the man that is no doubt my Prince Charming, all I can say about those fairy tales is:  HORSE SHIT!!!

That's right, princesses.  Your Prince Charming won't whisk you away from reality and magically produce these elaborate romantic moments to show you he loves and respects you.  Oh, he will show you love and respect, but you have to be smart enough to understand his own way of doing it.  You have to drop the expectation of something obvious and take notice of the more subtle, yet still grand, ways he shows love.

That was a tough lesson for me to learn.  After a disastrous first marriage, I thought for sure that when I finally found "the real thing", it would full of these epic pronouncements of love.  I believed in the fairy tale bullshit.  Until I realized that my husband shows me all the time that he loves me and romance isn't what someone else dictates; it's what you make of it.  Now that I'm aware of this, I'm a much happier girl.  I also see things in a whole new way.

For example: one of the most romantic things my husband does for me is loving my daughter as his own.  There are no fireworks involved, except on the 4th of July.  But who needs pyrotechnics?  This man met a child that was not his blood, he has endured a lot of adversity and heart ache as the "step dad", yet he continues to love her just the same.  He gets her up and walks her to school every morning, he is there to comfort her, discipline her, and experience life with her.  He would take a bullet for her.  She is HIS child; DNA does not enter into the equation at all.

Another example of true romance is support.  I'm not talking finances and this has nothing to do with physical support like you get with a really great bra.  I'm talking about the kind of support where you know, without asking, that whatever decision you make, you have a partner to walk that path with you.  Whether he 100% agrees with me or not, he speaks his mind, shares his opinion, but does not expect that I will always agree.  Rather than giving me grief for that, he remains at my side through it all and will even encourage me when he sees me lose motivation or nerve.  I am never alone.

Those are just a couple examples of "epic" romance.  There are smaller things, too.  Like washing the dishes and laundry without me asking him.  That is sexy as hell, y'all!  Or the way he opens the car door for me every time he drives.  (7 years he's been opening my car door and the only time he doesn't do it is when he's really, really, really mad at me.)  Even if we agree not to do anything for each other on certain holidays, he almost always gets me a card and writes something perfect in it.  He does his best to ensure that when the kiddo is w/ her bio-dad, we get to spend that day alone together, even if it means telling a friend "no".  (That one is pretty huge b/c he is not very good at using the word "no".)  He sits patiently through my rants and raves, he listens patiently as I belt out girly songs in the car...in fact, he's just overall patient with me and my wealth of craziness.  He always wants to shower with me on our days off.  He doesn't complain when my cooking sucks.  And best of all, he's never called me a bad name, even if there have been plenty of times when I earned an expletive or five.

When he proposed, it was in our living room, after a long and busy Christmas day.  I was in sweatpants and no bra.  There were no glass slippers or broken curses.  But it was perfect.

When we got married, there were no tear-jerking, hand-written vows.  We got married in Vegas by an Elvis impersonator while we wore t-shirts, jeans, and Converse.  But it was perfect.

We weren't high school sweethearts or long-lost loves.  We were both divorced and broken.  We aren't perfect.  But we're perfect for each other.

And that, my friends, is true romance.