That Kind of Love

This book began with a feeling I had experienced more than once.

I would come across a video of an older couple on TikTok. They might be laughing together, teasing one another, dancing in a kitchen, holding hands in a hospital room, or quietly tending to one another in some ordinary moment. There would be something in the way they looked at each other, something in the ease between them, that felt immediately recognizable and difficult to name.

Sometimes I would feel a tear come to my eye. Sometimes I would watch the video more than once. And then, like so many other people, I would turn to the comments.

The comments were almost always filled with the same longing.

I want that kind of love.

My grandparents had that kind of love.

May that kind of love hit me like a Mack truck.

· · ·

But then something about the comments began to bother me.

Why were all of us wishing for this as though it were something that either found us or did not?

Why did almost no one stop and ask what these couples had actually created?

· · ·

I was approaching my own twenty-seventh anniversary. I was not starting fresh with a new partner and a blank relational history. I was asking this question from inside a real marriage that already contained years of frustration, mistakes, coping mechanisms, repeated patterns, misunderstandings, defenses, and accumulated interpretations.

Could a person twenty-seven years into an imperfect marriage learn to relate differently?

· · ·

I went to my Facebook page and asked people to nominate couples they believed had this beautiful, exceptional kind of love.

The couples did not describe perfect partners.

They did not say their marriage had been free from struggle.

· · ·

I wanted to reverse engineer what they had done right.

· · ·

This book is the record of that search.

Could I learn to create more of that kind of love inside the marriage I already have?

Could you?

Heidi Arabia