I wish I had the luxury of being in love with idea of love.

Instead, I live with the reality of love every day and every night. I get the dishes and the laundry. The snores that wake me up at night as he lays beside me in our bed. Making coffee every morning even though I don't drink coffee, but he does. I don't get flowers anymore, not that he ever did. The ideal of love never included these things. Maybe they were in the fine print.

 He is the person that I turn to when I am afraid of what may be or what may not be. He understands that it is not the fear of failure that paralyzes my pen, but my fear of success. I don't really mind washing his socks and dirty underwear. It needs to be done and he's tried doing it himself, but he's laundry-impaired.

I wanted a hero, someone larger than life to love me for me. To paraphrase what Rosie O'Donnell's character said in Sleepless in Seattle- 'I wanted to be in love in a Hollywood movie.'

I wanted the fairy tale, the knight errant to sweep me off my feet. Nobody gets the fairy tale. Not even Cinderella and Snow White probably. Did you ever notice they always end the story at the wedding with  they lived happily ever after. What a crock!

Would I trade him now for what had been my ideal? No way!

He loves me more now than the day we met. The mundane things, the everyday things bind us closer together. We take care of each other with our whole hearts, for our whole lives.