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Issue Date: December 11, 2005
Choice is the heart of a marriage
Grand Forks, N.D., "Herald" reader sees love in everyday routines.
By Jessica Mercer Zerr
Every weekday, my husband, Ryan, gets up first to shower, giving me an extra 20 minutes to sleep. He wakes me with a kiss on my forehead and whispers he loves me. Then he leaves without turning on any lights so I get five more minutes. While I shower, he unloads the dishwasher and makes the decaf coffee we began drinking when we decided to start trying to conceive more than a year ago. When I emerge, my coffee is ready (two sugars, cream), and he hands me the newspaper. We speak little.
Zerr, 28, teaches English composition at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
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After work, I cook supper, giving him a half-hour to watch the news without interruption. After the weather report, he sits down at the table and watches as I finish preparing our meal. Pausing to plant a peck on his cheek, I set the steaming dishes in front of him. We eat and talk. Mostly we talk about what has to be done: groceries to buy, grass to mow, bills to pay. After dinner, if the weather is nice, we go for a walk, then watch TV. Bedtime comes at 9:30. When the lights are out, we confess the things that worry us, drawing strength from each other's nearness.
I believe this is love.
At an egotistical age 5, I asked my mother if she loved me or my father more, certain I knew the answer: me. Instead she bent down and looked me in the eye, hands gently resting on each shoulder. She explained that she couldn't help loving me. The love of a mother for her baby is incredibly strong. Then she told me the love she had for my daddy was a love of choice, which made it extra special. Of all the people in the world, she chooses him and he chooses her.
I would think about her declaration often in the coming years, as my parents adjusted to my mom's new career outside the home and coped with raising me. When conversations sometimes turned into arguments, I suspect they, too, thought about their choices.
Now that I'm married, I consider what it takes to stay married, and in love, as long as my parents (31 years). It's not that I don't believe in romance or appreciate the spontaneity of last-minute weekend trips that disregard the monthly budget, or witty conversation over champagne brunches. But I believe more in love that is embedded in the sacred of the ordinary -- of love communicated each time he cooks oatmeal and I schedule his dental appointment. In the contented, peaceful silence of our predictable, boring day, I choose him all over again.
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