How I knew it was love
I happened upon an MSN article entitled “How I knew it was love” earlier today. It’s the stories of 5 people and how they went from “Yeah, he/she’s great” to “This is it!” I rarely read MSN articles, but this one started me thinking about the moment I knew I loved Darren. As I said before, the process of us getting together was a long one, filled with bumps and bruises. But also good moments.
Having known each other since winter 2003, we ‘got together’ in February, 2005. This particular excerpt of our story comes from this past June.
I got what was probably the worst sunburn of my life that day. Of course I didn’t realize it. I knew I was burnt on the way home when I started to get pinker, but I didn’t grasp the depth of the red until I had gotten back to the Conley house, walked in the door and heard the gasps. I was burnt…badly.
Even then I mustn’t have fully understood what I had done to my body because Darren and I went out that evening to see his friend’s comedy show. When it was over, we stood around for a few minutes, talking with some friends of his until I persuaded Darren that I couldn’t stand there much longer. So we started walking toward his car, about 5 minutes away, on foot. We were discussing where we should go to grab a bite to eat when I started to feel really weak and dizzy. I passed out and he caught me right in front of a Mediterranean restaurant. He dragged me inside where the staff gave me some water and helped cool me down. Once I was ok to walk, we made it to the car and then to his house.
Darren brought me straight to bed and asked if he could read to me. So he started “The Magician’s Nephew.” I don’t remember a word he read, but I do remember thinking for the first time that I really loved him.
Perhaps it was the heat exhaustion blurring my senses, but when he kissed my hand and was closing the door behind him, I thanked him genuinely for taking care of me and started to cry happy tears. Call it delirium, if you will, but I call it love.
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Less than a month ago I experienced something very similar. It was an evening filled with me battling my form of depression (it presents itself as a combination of anxiety and apathy/refusal to deal with life). I was a mess: freaking out about all the stress I was under, feeling hopeless to do anything about it, lacking any motivation to try to do aleviate the stress-causing situations - a typical sob fest.
Darren forced me to talk through it from the other end of the phone connection. I do mean forced…it takes a lot of coaxing to get me started on the process to normalcy (I’m working on that) and it’s a highly frustrating exercise for Darren. Again, I have no idea what we talked about, but I remember clearly the words “I love you - the good parts and the frustrating parts.”
For the first time I think I began to understand God’s love. Darren knows a lot of my faults and still loves me. That’s amazing. But God knows all my faults (past, present and future) and still loves me. I’d never been able to believe that someone could love me if they knew what I was really like and thus, never been able to believe that God truly loved me.
It was a fabulous day.