Episode 7: The Suspicious World

Two months into our relationship, Judy coined the term “love dumb.”  We couldn’t make it anywhere on schedule.  Bills weren’t getting paid on time. We’d meet somewhere, leave together and forget to go back and retrieve her car (for like a week). We largely  ignored our friends and family and spent happy hours planning our first romantic getaway to Mendocino for October.  We played and made love, had fun and enjoyed being in that love dumb state, mostly oblivious to anything but each other.

But a couple of weeks after the Rob Thomas concert, we did make it out to a party hosted by one of Judy’s friends.  Boy, was that a mistake.  Talk about throwing cold water on a good thing.  Oscar Wilde once wrote, “The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life”.  We received a big bucket of that negativity at the party.  We were obviously happy—okay, giddy—as we milled about meeting the party’s interesting cast.  And then we ran into one of people Oscar Wilde was most definitely writing about.  Her response to our uber-romantic story? “Enjoy it.  It won’t last.” Wow!  Right to our faces!  Another said, “Oh, it’s new now.  What you have now will change into something else later.”

This was supposed to be an enlightened crowd.  What a bunch of nay-saying downers!  Why couldn’t her friends be happy for us? Didn’t we have what they all said they wanted? Why did they have to rain on our parade? Was it sour grapes? Was it because they’d already given up long ago? Or was it just simple jealousy?

Perhaps it was just a natural reaction. The idea that love can be easy and fun is just not part of our relationship lexicon. Mature relationships are supposed to be full of work and compromise, right?  Give and take.  Push and pull.  Ups and downs.  And, eventually, over the decades, once you’ve beaten and battered each other into submission, the reward of good life and love Is harvested from all those relationships seeds you’ve worked so hard to sew into the hard-tilled earth.

What a bunch of bull. Poetic? Sure. A necessary fact of relationship life? No way.

I believe in something else, something different.  I believe in relationships of ease and grace where friction and drama are relatively nonexistent.  I believe in a deep love that lasts–the same deep love that  Judy and I share.

Funny thing is, more than two years later we’re working crazy hard 7 days a week to bring this project to the world and guess what?  We’re still pretty love dumb.

The naysayers are wrong. Love like this can last…

Click here for Episode 8: Didn’t You Forget to Propose?