The happiest couples know that big romance lives in the smallest moments. So keep your champagne and caviar, your roses and candlelight. We'll take the simple, sweet memories that breathe love into every day. Six writers share theirs.
"Is that your husband?" The ER nurse is pointing to you, the fever-spiked lump who is snoring softly and muttering beside me. We've been here for hours, and for hours I've returned my lips over and over to your scalding forehead, as if to cool it, or, perhaps, to comfort myself. In just a little while longer, we'll find out that what you have is a severe case of strep, and you will swallow the prescribed pills, and I will finally put my lips to your quietly sleeping forehead and feel a welcome coolness. But for now the nurse's face is creased with compassion and weariness — she is waiting — and it's not really the right time to tell her about your gentle strength: the way you rocked our baby in the sling for hours on end while you graded papers, rocked another baby three years later while you did your anatomy homework, babies peacefully asleep across your broad chest for what feels like my entire adult life.
It's not the right time to explain what a funny contradiction you are, a hockey-playing massage therapist, or how just last week you lay your hands on a friend's father while he lay dying in hospice. She wouldn't understand how funny it is that you gave me bedtime coupons — promising to turn in early on the nights I redeem them — because you're a night owl and I miss you in bed, or how it feels when I come down in the morning to a toasty kitchen because you've already lit a fire in our wood stove. She doesn't know that I'm strangely euphoric, sitting here thinking about how lucky I am to have so much to lose — my rock, my mystery, the love of my life — that I'm sitting here thinking in sickness and in health. I will, I think. I do. But all I can say is yes. "Yes. That's my husband."
Work and Play
A few months ago, when my husband and I transitioned our son, Sawyer, into a big-boy bed, he refused to nap alone. We explained that we couldn't sleep with him; there was no room in his bed. Of course, he found a loophole. "Sleep next to my bed," he said. "There's room on my rug." Except he kept peeking over his guardrail to giggle at the sight of us. "Use my blanket and build a tent and you lie under it on the rug," he said, "so I don't see you." From our hideout in the tent, we kept still, listening to our little boy rustling like a safari cub.
When Sawyer's breath began to ebb and flow more evenly, I plotted our escape in my mind, then blurted out loud, "Uh oh." Sawyer stirred. I whispered the problem in Geoffrey's ear: "I left my glasses on his nightstand." Geoffrey ducked out to rescue my specs. Sawyer rolled over on his pillow, sighed, and smacked his lips. Geoffrey barely made it back into the tent without waking him. If we tried to leave now, we'd risk Sawyer's hearing the creak of floorboards, the doorknob's click, our dog panting in the hallway.
We didn't dare. We stayed put. Strewn about the rug, the whole Crayola rainbow, plastic dinosaurs, and hardened crumbs of Play-Doh. Along the rug's perimeter, Sawyer had lined up an assortment of toy cars that belonged to my husband when he was a boy. Geoffrey plucked a tiny metal wagon from the lot and whispered in my ear, "I used to put a peanut in this." He hitched it to an old-fashioned yellow car and towed it over my shoulder. It tickled. He put his hand over my mouth to stifle my laugh. I heard a crayon break under the weight of my back. But Sawyer was breathing deeply now, having drifted into the peaceable hum of sleep. I thought we would ready ourselves to leave. Instead, Geoffrey picked up the stubby end of a green crayon and a ragged piece of construction paper. He drew a hangman hook and the dotted lines of a secret message. I grinned. Geoffrey rolled the crayon toward me so that I could use it to guess a letter. Then I rolled it back to him. I got the first few wrong. One by one, Geoffrey drew a head, a long center line for the body, both legs and a foot. He had the same smirk on his face as when he beats me at tennis — not at all sorry. "Give up?" he mouthed, then filled in the puzzle: You are my sunshine. With the length of my arm, I swept away the mess and snuggled in close.
Cream and Sugar
I've been married to Jason for over 17 years. Which means I've woken up beside him something like 46,225 times. That's a really nice thing, easing into the new day with a person you dig. And whether one or both of us are rushing out the door with the kids during the week or we're savoring the horizontal-friendly nature of the weekends, our mornings always kick off the same way: with coffee.
One morning a while back, on a day when I was lucky enough to be the last one up, I bumbled downstairs, went to pour my first cup, and found a little scribble of a note next to the freshly brewed pot.
Three words: Wake up sleeper.
It made me ridiculously happy. There were a few things at work here. There was the white mug thoughtfully pulled from the cabinet and placed on the counter, there was the steamy jet-black coffee waiting to be poured, and there was the message, with its undertones of both comfortable domesticity and flirty middle-school note-passing. I promptly tucked it away for safekeeping.
He was back at it the next morning. And the next. And the next. He wrote on whatever was handy — scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, hotel stationery, Post-its — and about whatever was on his mind.
Some, like the first, were simple a.m. greetings:
First cup and Welcome to the day
Some seemed to have an audible, built-in sigh:
What a week and Keep parenting
Some commemorated a family milestone:
Last Saturday in this houseand 16 years!
Some focused on our couple-ness, which is to say putting our parenting purposely out of focus:
City dwelling, late night eating partner! and Super weekend with you
And one was composed of just eight letters and a symbol:
Everyday ♥
I don't think Jason knows I saved these notes, each and every one, in an envelope in the cupboard. We never talked about this exchange; somehow it became a silent, sacred ritual. Which is precisely why, without warning or fanfare, this magazine will be left open to this very page...and placed right next to our coffee pot.
Give and Take
I actually remember the tie — a fairly gruesome paisley specimen from the only mall within driving distance of our college. I remember the morning light filtering in through the window, the sound of the shower running. I remember concentrating as I made the first fold: over, then under.
A few weeks after we'd graduated and driven my station wagon to our new digs — a Boston University fraternity house, abandoned for the summer and to be shared with eight of our classmates — Ben had broken his arm. It was a bad break, cast from shoulder to wrist. And for his first "real" job, at a white-shoe law firm, he had to wear a suit.
"How will I tie my ties?" he'd asked, sounding a little desperate. I am capable in a crisis, can change a tire, prepare a meal for 20 on a moment's notice. "I could do it," I ventured. How hard could it be?
Later that day, I took a tie out of his closet and tried tying it around my own neck. At one point the knots got so convoluted that I thought I'd have to cut it off. All that week I practiced: on myself, on my best friend, even on our surprisingly willing dog. It turned out I was terrible at tying ties. When the knot was smooth, the lengths were wrong. I bought a tie for 25 cents at a thrift shop so I wouldn't mangle the few that Ben had. I kept practicing.
And then: Ben's first day of work arrived. He came to me, in the first suit he'd ever bought for himself, holding the ugly paisley tie in his one good hand.
I took it from him, and I took a deep breath, and carefully — slowly — tied it. "How do I look?" he asked. The length was fine. The knot was smooth.
For the rest of that summer, I tied Ben's tie every day before work. On the first post-cast morning, he appeared in the kitchen having done it himself. "I bet you're glad to be done with it," he said, and I smiled. But secretly, I wasn't glad at all.
Dark and Light
My husband and I both knew early on how high the stakes were for our relationship, but instead of liberating us, that knowledge made us nervous and polite. He held back; I obsessed, and I overdressed. It could have gone on like that forever, or ended in a stalemate, except that Alan persuaded me a few months in to join him at a bar to watch the opening match of the World Cup — a game that started at 3 in the morning. Something about waking up together at that hour of the night and walking down a desolate city boulevard made us feel, from the outset, that our every step was a little momentous. Then we entered a bar filled with charged-up Italians who welcomed us into their community. Almost immediately, we felt at home in another world, one with a different time zone, another language, a new set of passionate loyalties. Even though I was wearing glasses and jeans (a look that works a lot better for Tina Fey than it does for me), I could tell that Alan had never been more in love with me, because I was game enough to go along with him. He couldn't let go of my hand, and we practically ignored the match as we stared into each other's eyes, giddy with the sense that we'd crossed into a better, freer phase. Alan was inviting me into a life that would be filled with spontaneity and small thrills — and it was the night when we both knew there was no one else we'd rather take along on those adventures.
The narrative of our marriage is strung with many more of these post-midnight passages — watching the Northern Lights at 2 in the morning on a beach in Connecticut, or taking a moonlit walk along the cow paths of southern France, with the light so bright we could see almost every blade of grass or curl of a sheep's fur. And part of what has made those nights so especially charged for us is a certain sense memory of that first one, when we left ourselves far enough behind to fully find each other. We finally walked out of the bar, hand in hand, some time around 7, and as everyone's day was dawning, our night was just starting.
War and Peace
Marriage squashes romance. Sex leads to children. Moisture can make rashes. That what I've become especially expert on — the rashes.
Am I a 40-something married (13 years!) woman missing the forest for the trees? Perhaps, but as a mother, I find myself obsessing not just over trees but over the actual leaves on the trees. I have to be sure those leaves aren't oleander and that there's no nearby stepladder my kids can push toward the leaves in order to pull them off and eat them. Recently I discovered my girls were cleaning out our kittens' earwax with Q-tips. That knowledge filled me with...relief! So that's what that snarl of Q-tips on my bed stand was! Not pretty, is family life.
Yet it was lice that delivered to my husband and me an unexpected hit of romance. No matter how many times I treated our 6-year-old, Suzy, with Nix, washed the sheets and sprayed, those bugs kept coming back. Convinced the problem was her haircut, I attacked Suzy's hair with dog-grooming scissors (all I could find in our wreck of a house). Result? Now little Suzy looked like a lopsided version of punk rocker Sid Vicious, in tiny pink princess glasses.
But my heinous work wasn't done. I had to comb out the nits — provided I could get Suzy to sit still for 20 minutes — oh! I was a failed mother. But instead of pointing out this obvious fact, my fun-loving, serenely patient husband got out a pack of cards and engaged little Sid Vicious in a happy game of War. Which is why I love him. Because of the War. What man can make not just lice romantic, but War?