My cousin recently sent us this photo of ourselves dancing at his wedding, which took place maybe 17 years ago or so. When I first glanced at it, the first thing I noticed was the huge smile on my wife’s face. We were on the dance floor probably line dancing to whatever was popular at the time. I’m right behind her with a noticeable (grimace? smirk?) on my face, trying my best to keep up with the beat and the rhythm. (Now if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is!).

Sure, we look young as hell (my cousin said we look like teenagers, which we heard a lot in our early years). But just look at that radiant smile. I mean, she’s not even looking at the camera, or really anyone else in particular. She’s just minding her own business, stepping to the beat of the music, having herself a good time. That’s why I luv this woman.

That’s who I fell in love with, ironically as a teenager our freshmen year at Emory University. In a story that lives in family lore (because I retell it at least multiple times a year to the girls), we lived in the same freshmen dorm, sang in the gospel choir together, and even had a class together, but barely noticed each other for an entire semester. Correction, she barely noticed me. I was trying my best to get noticed by anyone who would pay attention, but she was busy living her best life, and that at the time decidedly did not include me.

I remember the first real time I noticed her, she was coming into the dorm lobby after track practice (she ran track for our college team). I can still see the yellow and green track shorts hugging against her, ahem, body. What have we here….? It was lust at first sight! started finding reasons to coincidentally be in the lobby, which was easy since my room was on the ground floor right next to it. The point is, I spent a lot of time in the lobby. But apparently, she wasn’t in to me. To hear her tell it later on, she didn’t think I was a serious person. She wasn’t wrong, I was very much an unserious person at the time. I ran around the dorm in my underwear. I chased after every girl who would give me the time of day. Really the only thing I was serious about at the time was my faith, but I thought, who wanted to see that side of me?

Little did I know that our fate would turn on a fateful evening when we were all hanging out in a mutual friend’s room. Most of the group pre-gaming for college night out. As folks began to leave for their planned night of debauchery, we noticed that we were the only two left. That led us to striking up a conversation and we haven’t stopped talking since. It turns out, we had more in common than we knew. All it took was the opportunity to spark a fire, and we’ve spent the past 25 years (21 of them married), keeping those flames burning.

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Relationships are admittedly weird (and hard work). People ask us, how have you stayed together for so long, what’s the secret? There’s no secret. It’s just each day waking up and choosing to tend to the fire a little more. If you’ve ever been camping you know how tedious this can be. You want to do other things, you get distracted, the fire doesn’t seem to cooperate. Sometimes the fire ebbs and flows. You pour lighter fluid on it and boom, you’ve got a blazing flame… but not for long. When it dwindles down to the bare embers you worry, how are we going to coax this thing back to life. I’ve seen us blow on dry sticks, trying to use the trapped oxygen to help us keep the flames going.

Sometimes that’s what it feels like in relationships. You use what you have to keep the flame going until you find better tools. But, if I had any advice to give, it’s what I tend to offer new couples who remind me of us in this picture from so many years ago: people change, everybody grows; the trick in healthy relationships is choosing to grow up together.

I still love us.  

I still love that she’s the first person I want to see when I wake up in the morning, and the last person I want to see before I close my eyes at night.  

I love that we still keep each other’s secrets and believe in each other’s dreams.  

I love that we’ve grown.  In many ways, neither of us are the same person we were when we began this journey together.  Nor have we changed that dramatically.  We’ve just supported each other as we’ve discovered more of our true selves.  

It’s been an evolution.  

No change comes easy, yet we’ve given each other grace to grow.  

I love that our love is not fragile.  

It is withstanding the test of time

It has grown, and so have we.

SDW3