Friday I'm in love...

So many types of love... but today, I am celebrating possibly the most complex of all loves – my being-in-love with my man. 

If we go by our knowledge of period dramas (hurrah!) romantic love seemed simple – categorized primarily by the social class you fit into. You’re a farmer? Well, you cant marry the Queen, lovey.

It all centred around marriage. There were social expectations; no sex before marriage, try to marry into money, women – honour and definitely obey your husbands... But today most relationships are far more free – and thank goodness for that. The social pressure young people felt into choosing either a good marriage or a life within the Church, is luckily not the norm.

On the phone to my Gran yesterday:  ‘Guess what, it’s my five year anniversary tomorrow’.

(Hold your horses, not five years since marriage  - but since I was an infatuated teenager fresh into university, and he’d plucked up the courage to ask: ‘Will you go out with me?’...)

I certainly wasn’t prepared for my Gran’s answer: ‘Good Lord. You’re not marrying him yet are you – too young for that – I sometimes feel too young for marriage myself after making your Grandfather’s tea for over fifty years!’

I was surprised. My Gran is a bit of a traditionalist. I remember being very young, around seven, and after being told that one day I would grow up and marry a handsome man, I piped up: ‘Ooh no, I think I’d rather live with him first – I need to make sure he’s nice before I marry him.’ Neither my Gran, nor my Mum were amused. Maybe social expectations hadn’t quite died out...

With my parents going through the nastiest divorce in history, I’m not hugely impressed with the white fluffy dress. Love and marriage does not always come together as Mr Sinatra would have us believe. Love just isn’t that safe or fixed. We are not in complete control of our lives, the events which might occur in them, nor in control of the person we may become in our future. In the case of my parents; they grew individually and at the same time didn’t grow parallel - they fell apart. The love got lost somewhere in the middle .

Perhaps an even bigger bash to love than focusing on your self too much, is becoming so engrossed in your relationship, that you neglect yourself – and forget how to grow individually. How easy it is – and I hold my hands up to this one - to love one person and love your relationship, but forget to love yourself.   It’s about looking forward together, rather than looking inwardly at each other.

Real, romantic love is like crystal. It’s so very delicate and utterly beautiful and can only take so many bashes before it breaks. It’s complex; two individual souls connecting on a love vibration, but two souls who feel, speak and hear life differently.

I have done what my seven-year-old self thought logical. I am living with my handsome man before I consider marrying him.  I am now fully aware of all his annoying habits - from cutting the end off the cheese in case it’s ‘gone off’, to stealing my deodorant because he forgets to buy his own – and thank goodness, it makes me love him more for his weirdness, not less.

Being in love has taught me that love is free and beautiful, and worth every effort to keep it from breaking, but it should be lived by the moment, not assumed for the future. I have been in love for five years, and it’s easy to transform years into expectation or routine but I am determined to live my love each day by day – and keep on reminding myself how special it is.