Repost: Our Love

Update: Below is the original post in its entirety. I would just like to acknowledge my husband on our anniversary. Here's to life, love and US!!!

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In my quest to bring the love back, I have promised to post about love: being loved and giving love. In my quest to celebrate the connections between people, I have committed myself to blog about how love appears in my own life as well. One of the most present ways that I am able to experience love is through my relationship with my husband. From the day that we became a couple, it has been us against the world. We are the law abiding Bonnie and Clyde, the younger, less wealthy (but no less rich) Cliff and Claire Huxtable...basically, we are a united front.

When I first met him, I knew that we were connected in ways that extended beyond this world. In fact, we both felt it and would make references to us being from the same "soul neighborhood" where kindred spirits lived. As we moved closer in our connection, we admitted that we were, in fact, soul mates. And I don't mean in the hot and heavy, breathless, "do me baby, I gotta have you" way that shapes most new relationships. Of course we desired each other, but our connection spoke of past lives and intertwined spirits that reunited through different life times until they emerged in our current forms...deep, right? But we meant it and lived out our connection with every fiber of our beings.

We spent time getting to know each other before we decided to be exclusive. Yup, he courted me. And I reciprocated in kind. We sent puzzle pieces with coded messages to each other, wrote letters that included excerpts from stories we enjoyed and we talked...yes, we talked. We listened, we felt, we acknowledged and then we would do it all over again daily. I knew his likes, his dislikes, his passions, his desires, his hopes, his dreams and he reciprocated in kind. And guess what? We didn't have sex on the first date (yup, we went on real dates) and we didn't become a couple after that date either. We let us marinate. We waited and discovered that being together was the only option because neither one of us could imagine being without the other. And then we began building...

So this post is an open love letter to my husband because I want to speak to the ways that he has shown me love and has made me want to be a better person. If you know me in real life, then you may have seen us together. If so, you know that our connection is bona fide...We are connected in unspeakable ways that make strangers come up to us and tell us that they love us together even though they've just met us at that moment. We are bonded in ways that defy explanation, but never defy logic. Of course, we're together as a couple, because when you see us together, even you couldn't imagine us apart.

My husband is, as Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, "a friend of my mind." In fact, "[He] gather me, man. The pieces I am, [he] gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a [man] who is a friend of your mind." I make no apologies about loving my husband or the fact that he loves me. I have had enough hardship to last 20 lifetimes and I am blessed to have a man who loves me in all ways, always. And I reciprocate in kind.

Here are a few of our favorite songs:

"Anniversary" by Tony Toni Tone (I think it's obvious why)



"If This World Were Mine" Remake by Luther Vandross and Cheryl Lynn (This was our wedding song)



"A Song for You" by Donny Hathaway (Because he always sang this to me when we first started dating)



"Kissing You" by Faith Evans (First song we kissed to)



"Where Would I Be?" by Kindred the Family Soul (Because, um, well...where would we be if we didn't have each other?)