Happy Birthday Shawna: On love, loving and being loved.

Love is not simple.

I realize this idea runs counter to every romantic comedy ever produced. Love is not inevitable, nor obvious, nor easy.

I love you Shawna. It's the truest thing I know.

At some point, in the hubris of my youth, I convinced myself love must be easy. I thought love was the perfect match of two souls, or histories, or something. It isn't. Love is hard. Love is a choice. Love's decision infiltrates every part of our lives. To be charitable to my younger, idiot self, I wasn't totally wrong. Loving someone makes them part of the whole. I have friends I barely talk to, and never see, who I love dearly. And I don't just mean the memory of them. They are part of me. They always will be. Hell, I have a sister I never see, nor talk to. I still love her. I was right about love in many ways. But, like most childish notions my understanding was too simple.

Love isn't a static state.

You aren't simply 'in love' or 'not in love'. It is practice. It is a process. It's a fucking job. I mean that in the best way. It is the most fulfilling  job you will ever have. Of course, those stakes mean it is the hardest job you can imagine. Love, real grownup love, is the thing history is built upon. It is the back story for legends and powerful men and women. But those stories are seldom told in popular culture. Real love stories are the unwritten wives, mothers, and fathers that allow heroes their journey. Real love is the foundation of social reality.

I'm not a great man, nor a legend. (No Fuck). But I see a shadow of those stories told in Shawna's work to love me every day. I'm not a fan of pretending people are perfect. I left black and white thinking in my twenties. I don't like making character into caricature. Shawna isn't perfect. I wouldn't even say she is perfect for me. That's just demonstrably unknowable. I haven't met anywhere close to the four, or so, billion women on the planet. (Not to mention the exceptionally pretty-as-a-girl, men out there---I'm looking your way Orlando Bloom).

But she is mine.

And no, I don't mean in some douche bag possessive way. She is a chosen part of who I am. I have become the person I am in relationship to her. Simply, without her I am not myself. I made that choice many years ago. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard. That pattern holds. But I never question my love. I work at it every day. Like most jobs, some days I work hard and some days I don't. But it is the act of putting in time and weaving together two lives that is the work of love.

That's how I know Shawna loves me, even when she is sad and not sure if she loves herself. As always, the feeling is not the important bit. Feeling in love is nice. It can be intoxicating. It can be maddening. But it's just a feeling. I've felt like killing people. The key is that I didn't. And the key to love is what we do. Shawna takes care of me, and our boys, every day. She wakes up tired. She feeds them, even after they've bitten her nipples and laughed. She changes them and keeps them clean while they wriggle and writhe and struggle to free themselves. It is hard and mostly unrewarding work. She does it for love. It usually doesn't feel like that. But it lets me go to work, write my dissertation and try and be the person I picture in my head.

That person, real and imagined, doesn't exist without Shawna's love. That person, without the acts of mundane passion and real life building, is only a shadow. I am only myself, past, present and future, in relationship to Shawna.

I chose her many years ago. I choose her again this day. I'll choose her once more tomorrow.

She is mine. I am hers. We are ours. I love you Shawna.