Can you still be in Love after 9 years?

Recently Scott and I celebrated our 9th Wedding Anniversary. This made me ponder the concept of love as it relates to our marriage.

I feel that the love between my husband Scott and I is a sacred bond. It is most important because the union of our love created our 3 children, who are life itself. All the other loves in my life have been preparatory to this moment, so that I can be part of this creative loving energy. Together Scott and I are the yin and the yang, the sky and the earth. In no other life endeavor do I think that we will fulfill more of our purpose then in the unity of our love for one another. The love between us is the source of creation; and so it is with every couple who come together in love. This unity is so special that I will go even as far as to say that my love for my husband surpasses my love for my children because without that love my children would not exist; and my love for my children surpasses everything else. In religious terms the love of our family can be explained symbolically through the trinity. We are 3 loves in one, but all the pieces are important and unbounded. Being so centrally important to our lives, and being essentially boundless (limitless), love is a complicated thing. After 9 years of marriage and the demands of the everyday, it is hard to think of our marriage as sacred or to feel the sweet euphoria of intoxicated lovers. In a lot of ways, the love of marriage reminds me more of a river in nature then the trinity. It has calm parts, and then treacherous waters that seem to never end. Sometimes the river of love runs deep and other times there is barely a trickle in the river bed. However the water, like our spirits, is not deterred. Somehow the water is miraculously pulled toward the ocean as we are pulled toward our source in God. Despite how rocky the terrain, water still remains the most powerful force on earth. It sustains us and moves us forward. Water has the ability to gently romance us or to drown us. So it is with love. The faces of love are ever changing as the river changes from morning to night. Recently, Scott and I watched the tail end of the Disney movie ‘Pocahontas’. In it, Mother Willow (who embodies the spirit of God) says, “You do not know what will happen around the river bend.” And so it is with love. Love is a great river of experiences and it has many twists and turns that breath new life into every current. Recently, my son Alex discovered that the Mississippi river is 2,348 miles long. Although our lives can not be measured is such exact terms, they (like the river) will have many ups and downs over the journey of a thousand miles. The question is never about whether there will be rocks and rapids along the way, but how we will navigate them as we get pulled along toward the ocean.

Then as it was, then again it will be
And though the course may change
sometimes
Rivers always reach the sea
Led Zeppelin, Ten Years Gone