Though I am a hopeless romantic I am not generally very good at romance.
As a friend is wont to say, I am a sap, I cry at even repeated viewings of pretty much any Pixar or Disney movie, or for that matter, a long list of romantic movies from Amelie to Shakespeare in Love. Oh, and musicals; and a good concert… well, you get the picture.
I am, however, somewhat inept at romance. My wife always tells the story of when we were looking for our first apartment together at an age so tender that we were barely out of college. Just out of earshot of the real estate agent she asked me: “Should we be doing this?” – I answered immediately and with no hesitation – “We have no choice”. Many years later as she is telling the story to the dinner party guests that she has mesmerized – she is a magnificent storyteller – “Isn’t it romantic, we just could not live without each other!” – I in my inimitable absent-minded way added – “I just meant we could not afford to have two apartments”. This anecdote is part of her repertoire still, with the added frisson of my now revealed cluelessness.
Episodes like this one dot the story of our life together like mileage markers. A couple of years after we started living together we decided to move to Puerto Rico, where I had grown up, and where I felt that perhaps I had to live. I went ahead to secure a job and we were separated for a few weeks. I was very unhappy without her – her absence hurt me almost in a clichéd physical way. When I picked her up at the gate she looked so beautiful and radiant coming out of the jetway (you could do that then). We drove from the airport in a borrowed two-tone malaise era Chevy Malibu, my love nestled perfectly against my side on the bench seat and I was overcome. I knew I could never again be apart. What followed is a bit of a blur, but I believe that I just blurted out that we should get married – no kneeling, no ring, not even stopping the car – in such an incomprehensible and ham-fisted way that I do remember that she asked me if I was in fact proposing. She is also very fond of telling this story and reminding everybody that her father supplied the family heirloom engagement ring since I had none to offer.
I am not completely despistado – a favorite word in Spanish that carries more freight than clueless – I have my moments. She has a rich set of love letters that I sent her on an almost daily basis when we were first apart and letters were a thing. I have had some major hits in the gifting department. I always and sincerely underestimate her size when buying her clothes, which she finds charming. She has an extended circle of close friends that she keeps in daily touch with over the phone, so I bought her a cell phone as soon as it was a practical device in the late eighties. After her literary agent unexpectedly and tragically died, I surreptitiously borrowed her files, typeset her murder mystery myself and had ten hardcover copies printed with embossed spines and a custom dust jacket peppered with in-jokes.
We have now been together for forty years as I am writing this – an entire lifetime together. We have traveled, shared her passion for music and mine for cinema, danced in fountains, sat down to dinner every night and raised a nice young man that we love and makes us proud.
A strong, healthy relationship is one you renew, by choice, every single day, and there is no end in sight for our desire to sit side by side and participate in the world and our lives together. That, in my book, is true romance.