i. Lessons from a List

For our first year anniversary, I gave my husband a big piece of paper with a list of a hundred things I love about him written on it. “The Love List” seemed fitting, since paper is meant to be the theme for first year gifts, but also because it marked a significant turning point; I’d finally stopped worrying that I’d made the most colossal mistake of my life.

What plagued me through our first year of marriage, and most of our engagement too, was this haunting & relentless question: how can you be sure you’ve chosen the right person? In short; how do you know you really love someone?

Even though I knew my HF (Husband-Friend) was a great match for me, and the type of good, kind, gentle godly man I’d always hoped to marry, those questions niggled at the back of my mind throughout a year of dating. By the time we’d gotten engaged, my mind was in overdrive; analysing my feelings every second of the day and constantly questioning whether he was “The One”. I asked my friends, my family, and prayed and prayed for a sign from God, desperate to be absolutely sure. When I still found myself questioning after 3 months of marriage, it confirmed my worst nightmare; I must have married the wrong person.

But here’s the thing. While I was fixating obsessively about how I was feeling, and how fulfilled our marriage was making me, I totally missed the main point. Marriage, it turns out, is not for me – and it’s not designed to fill me up. Contrary to what we’ve been conditioned to believe (thanks, Disney!), HF is not supposed to be my knight in shining armour, who swoops in to “complete” me. That’s a big God-shaped hole right there, that no marriage could ever fill.

And whilst I was so busy trying to work out if HF was my “soulmate”, I didn’t see all the amazing blessings of our marriage in the day-to-day of doing life together. Not the Hollywood version of love, not the butterflies and rainbows, but the real thing; the friendship, the companionship, the laughs and the cries, and the silly little things that make us “us”. The real life version; the God-planned version.

That’s where The Love List started; a year’s worth of things to be grateful for, along with a big lesson – I suspect a lifelong one – about what real love is about.

If I could sum up what I’ve learned so far, it would be this: love is not just a feeling. Love is an action, and a choice. Love is preceded by commitment, not the other way around. And the measure of real love – the thing I’d prayed for so many times – turns out to be how much you give of it; no matter how you feel. All part of God’s perfect plan.

Here’s to another hundred.