#10 to Enriching your Marriage – ROMANCE!!

I made romance #10 because it is a 10 in my book!! The icing on the cake!! I love romance! The whole WORLD loves romance!! That amazing thing called LOVE that blossoms between a  man and a woman that just seem MADE for each other- “oh! It’s soooo romantic!”

We ALL love romance! And rightly so, it is beautiful – and we ALWAYS hope in our heart or hearts that the romance we see is REAL, we ALWAYS hope it LASTS!!!

There’s all kinds of romance…from the flutter your heart first puppy love variety to the 50 years plus, faithful and true, lasting, love-conquers-all-in-the-end, best friend  and Lover Forever variety!! Hurray!!!! Just talking about that kind of romance makes me cheer – we ALL all hope for THAT kind of romance!

I’m somewhere smack dab in the middle.  Mike and I are in the heat of the day, the hot of summer.  It is not spring magic or autumn splendor for us, though we have days now and then that feel like either one.  But most are full of hard work, sweating it out, getting it done, WONDERFULLY ROMANTIC SUMMER!!!

After we met, fell in love, married for happily ever after and began the real challenges, I began, for the first time, to find out first hand just what romance really is!!

I felt the most grateful and connected I’d ever felt to my Love one night, 3 years after being married when we knelt by the bed for prayers and could hardly make it through them for how exhausted we were by all the work we had done together that day! (All the work we were doing every day with our 3 little ones under 2.  But we were unified and connected despite all the challenges we were facing! – it was sooooo romantic.

I was surprised the first time I felt wildly romantic just BEING HOME together with me making dinner and Mike working on a project in the garage!  Why was it so excitingly, wonderfully romantic to me??? Because we were in the worst part of residency, on top of that my husband was finishing a master’s degree.  (They let him opt to add a year more to training or do it during his second and third year of residency.  They don’t give anyone that choice anymore – you add an extra year.  Wise. Since this time it was also made illegal to have residents work more than 80 hours a week.  Wish that came just a year or two sooner!! LOL!!)  It was extremely challenging to catch a conversation once a week, date night was more than every three weeks it seemed! And here we were one night at home, doing completely normal at-home things together and, for me, it was wildly, WONDERFULLY romantic!!!

Romance was mine this week as I struggled through the night with 2 babies cutting teeth, just as one would get back to sleep the other would wake in miserable crying again.  At 5 am I hadn’t gone to bed yet.  I desperately longed for sleep but seemed there was no way to get it now! I wanted so much for my husband to sleep, he had gone to bed late and would waking up shortly to make a long drive to meetings far away. I wanted him to be safe on the road.

I finally went to make a bottle and see if that would get this baby back to bed for a while.  Just as I lay down beside her to feed her my husband was standing beside me picking her up out of my arms.  “You need to sleep,” he said, “you haven’t been to bed all night.”

How did he know that anyway??

“Mike, you sleep a little longer, I want you to be safe on the roads.”

“I’ll be fine,” he stated and took the baby away.

My body surrendered to the soft bed beneath me and I closed my eyes and felt sleep coming on right away, but not before a couple tears did.  Tears of thanks and tenderness for my own personal knight-in-shining armor, “Thank you Mike.”

My husband is constantly doing kind and thoughtful things for me.  He constantly lets me know he is aware of me and mindful of my needs.  May we all be that kind of ROMANTIC!!!!

“True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well-being of one’s companion.”   -Gordon B. Hinckley

It’s true, ROMANCE, REAL ROMANCE, the kind that thrills the deepest part of the heart and lasts forever is based on REAL LOVE and LOVE is always mindful, thoughtful, kind and considerate of other’s hearts.

So CELEBRATE ROMANCE in your marriage today!! Not the candle-light and star-glow variety but the REAL and LASTING kind that shows you really care!!

Soooooooo romantic!!!.

I’d LOVE to hear if you’d love to share!!!

C

 

 

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