At the wedding, we asked guests to write us notes on love from their personal experience. These are the notes that people said we could put on the website.
Dear Buck and Claire
In my experience of married love, it waxes and wanes like the moon. At times it’s strong and passionate and you’re very focussed on each other. Then things shift, and your focus is elsewhere, like when I had babies. A mother's focus is very much on her babies, for a good reason --- to ensure they survive. Then they grow and your focus shifts again. As your dad, Buck, and I have traveled through 30 years of marriage, we’ve been through many changes, both internally and environmentally, and luckily we’ve been able to move and grow with each other’s changes and get used to the new version of ourselves. I’ve been the most changeable and I’m so blessed that Joe has chosen to keep loving the new me. I trust that you’ve inherited your father’s loyalty, Buck. I’m so lucky that he’s been loyal to me and chosen to stay through thick and thin. Because life gets sticky, and leaving is easier than staying. I’m glad we’ve stayed together so that we can share the joy of this special occasion with you two.
Karen
Lying to each other is fine. As long as it’s in fun and serves a purpose. I never would have been able to see “Silence of the Lambs” with Lisa if I had not told her it was an Irish pastoral love story. And it was worth it, our relationship recovered in a few months and then we had Claire!
Rich Zabel
Lisa told me to rip this up, and I told her I did.
Make sure you make each other laugh.
*Also never give more than one piece of advice.
Rich
Like 80% of being a good spouse is being a good housemate.
Love is about doing the dishes even though you hate doing the dishes and it’s normally her job, but she had a crappy day and you don’t have any way to make it better.
So you do the stupid dishes.
Robert Ansel.
My marriage has been at its most thrilling and intimate and whole when it felt to me that the best and strongest version of myself would be madly in love with the best and strongest version of my wife, and that the more we grew the more in love we would be.
My experience of love is rather limited, but I will do my best to provide some useful advice.
When you are in love with someone, you share a special connection. You appreciate and value each other’s strengths and capabilities. If you love someone, you can trust them, and know they will always stand by you and your opinions.
My best advice: have the relationship you want. Don’t worry or care about society and its unreasonable expectations. Live the life you want to have. Cherish each moment together, and each other. Stand up for what you believe in, and enjoy the experience.
From your little brother James :)
Love is a feeling but it’s also a verb. Showing your love is considering what’s important to the other person and doing things that you think will make them feel good, even if they’re not the things that make you feel good.
I once learned the concept “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?”
Consider what’s right for you, and also what’s right for the marriage and relationship. It often requires communication (I think you’re great at that), negotiation, and compromise.
Karen
Fucking helps.
The ability to say no is required to be able to say yes; it’s important to me to be able to say “fuck yes” every day. I think people entering into a relationship, especially one with expensive exit like marriage, should think about how they will preserve their freedom to say no.
Choose love every day. Decide to make your love last, and it will. Be kind to each other.
Relationships are a good place to practice valuing others’ experience equally to yours.
Talking openly about utilitarian tradeoffs that come up has worked well for us.
I think you often can and should take responsibility for another person’s happiness and wellbeing. But I think letting someone take responsibility for yours or leaning on the relationship to make you feel better has gone badly for me --- it gets you into the wrong kind of mindset.
IMO, the important way to love someone and be loving to them is treating the relationship and their welfare like a serious goal, and allocating focused time, cognitive effort, and executive function appropriately. E.g. setting reminders for things you want to remember to do, active practice, scheduled work blocks. This is the peak of romance---having things you want to remember to do in conversation with your partner in your anki deck/TAPs system.
If you have a crush on someone and you don’t want to, try finding their most unattractive feature and focusing on it. Or have someone tell you all the ways they think they’re kind of lame.
Love is not about all of the sweet fairy tale moments. Love is all the stuff that happens in between. It’s about making up and laughing after fighting, it’s about venting about work friends, it’s predicting what the other person wants for dinner and all the silliness in between. And just being excited to sit next to each other in silence.
When Keith’s gone, the silence is so loud, but when we are together on the couch (in our own worlds) there is so much love and joy. Soak in these moments of mundaneness because they are memories too.
Love you both!
Shanon Hanson
Love as gentle intensity.
Intensely looking in the same direction. Gently looking at each other.
Sometimes the worst thing you can do is love someone too much. Don’t need each other, want each other; don’t be dependent but choose to trust and be open. And tell the truth. Easier said than done but being honest can decide everything. You deserve the world and you both look so happy together. Love you so much <3
Someone once broke up with me by saying he loved who I wanted to be, but that he couldn’t wait for that to happen.
I think, probably, that love is realizing that even the person you adore has tendencies towards good and bad, and that will never change. What matters is someone who can see when you need support to follow the right impulses---and ride out the ones you need help with. And in return, you trust them to love you with the full knowledge of your worst qualities. You never promise those qualities will go away. You work together to manage them, instead.
And that makes it so, so much easier to trust each other to magnify the good qualities, too.
Give your partner the space they need to be their own person.
Mayank
Dearest Claire and Buck
Love is listening to the same story 150x and not rolling your eyes. Love is giving your partner(s) the cold side of the bed. Love is cuddling when you’d really rather not. (But it’s consensual.)
Love is spending time with people you don’t know for hours on end just to make your partner happy. Love is tolerating farts in the bathroom.
Molly V
DON’T SCREW IT UP
Love, Maggie