In The Classroom Of Life: Not As Perfect As They Show In The Movies!

Movies make you filmy.

‘My love life will never be satisfactory until someone runs through an airport to stop me from getting on a flight,’ I always thought, ‘Just like they show in the movies.’

This is a rumor, an urban myth, a fiction, a fantasy, a black and white screen cliché, whatever you name it, that makes love looks like the mad, romantic dash through airports for that last chance at a flailing kiss. Well, it is just a myth.

He’s never run through an airport for me.

He’s held my hands, my shaking legs and my head as I’ve bared down and groaned a baby into being. He has run for ice creams and doctors and had had night shifts of changing baby diapers and laid himself low to help me hold on through the hard rock and roll and push and pull of labor pain. And I’ve never drowned holding onto his hand.

I went unwell once, I threw up so hard, that I couldn’t stand the coming morning. He moved over and gave me the bed. He let me warm my ice cold feet between his legs and the covers at the night. He went out for snake and ladder, mind numbing games to keep our daughter occupied. I looked in the mirror then and there was nothing romantic looking back at me, but around those dark circles, the parched white cheeks, there was a deep sense of romance about ‘being loved beyond how I looked’.

No. He’s never run through an airport for me.

He’s gone out for milk at 10 p.m, he’s held our daughter through bouts of sickness and yet told me there is nothing about Myra that disgusts him. He’s carried her on his shoulders when I was too tired or too sad or too done to keep doing the everyday in’s and out’s that make up a life. He’s unloaded a hundred loads of laundry and put the dishes away.

He runs on snatched sleep. He is patient, kind, protective and trustworthy. Always perseveres to give us the best. And Myra and me, come running to him. We spill out the details of our day into the hands of the man who loves us unconditionally. He lays down his life for us, happily and it looks like so many ordinary moments stitched together into the testimony of a good man who comes home to his family every night after a demanding job. And it's rare, but he likes to bring home random little gifts for me and delights in watching me open them.

It undoes me every time to look around and find him there, always around me, to dispel the darkness and share the happiness. He’s run a thousand times around the sun with me and we hold hands at night between the covers even when we’re wretched and fighting. We’re always fighting our way back to each other.

He’s never run through an airport for me.

He is the ordinary unremarkable love that walks slowly every day alongside me. He tells me multiple times in a day that he loves me. He makes me laugh, even when I’m super mad at him. He holds me when I cry. He gives me forehead kisses. He listens to me hysterically mull over the dumbest things. He gives me foot rubs every night. He puts me before anything else and thinks I’m amazing.

This ordinary love that wakes up with bad breath and crease marks on its cheeks. And this is our life – to live life’s each small, unbearably tedious moment– together, sometimes even the mounting pressure. We are a great team together. He is mine. And I’m his. He is my best friend.

He treats me like queen, which is far better than I deserve. ‘Dutiful wife’ is a hard term to swallow unless there is a ‘dutiful husband’ term that is used right alongside with it. He is that dutiful husband that in turn makes me a dutiful wife.

He has never run through an airport for me.

This is the love with the lights on and eyes wide open. ‘Realistic’ love. This is the brave love, the scared love, simply ordinary, not as perfect as they show in the movies.

Despite it, we love each other incredibly. As I see the platinum engagement band wrapped around my finger, I realize how far we have come, from the day we got married to this day, our love for each other not minimizing a bit. This band best signifies our marriage, something so durable that stands the testimony of time. It still dazzles! Each day we have spent together has been our ‘Platinum Day of Love’.

He pretty much does everything, so I don't need him running through airports for me.

This is my story. Ordinary. It is still better than any Notebook, any Romeo and Juliet, any Titanic, even better than any Twilight or Princess Bride. Marriage is hard. It is something that has to be worked for. But the reward of spending each day with your soul mate is absolutely best. We have so much fun together, we learn together. We trip over old jokes and misunderstandings, to catch our runaway tongues and tempers. He has been a dutiful father and a faithful husband. He is a shadow of me. He is my 'soulmate'.