Wedding gowns to weekend grubbies
I like to look at a photograph of my wife in her wedding dress.
Oh, boy. Let me tell you. I never get tired of that image. Looking at it, I go back over every detail about the way she looked on our wedding day. That memory is a well from which I enjoy drinking almost daily.
As much as that wedding picture means to me and as much as I think about it, there is an image of my wife that means a hundred times more.
It is the way she looks at the end of the day or when she first gets up in the morning. It’s when she’s in what she calls her “grubbies.”
When I see my wife in her grubbies, I have two thoughts:
I am jealous. It’s not fair that her beauty is so natural that she can look so good when she’s not even trying. It takes me great effort and time just to get presentable for the public. All she has to do is roll out of bed.
I’m the only one in the world who gets to see her like this. She trusts me enough to share herself with me. Just sitting on the couch with her at night or walking into the bathroom while she’s brushing her teeth makes me feel like the most privileged man in the world. Other people get to see only the parts of herself that she chooses to show them; I get to see all of her.
I feel the full joy and the full responsibility of this gift, this honor.
I don’t understand men who get bored with their wives.
My wife took my breath away on our wedding day when she dressed for the whole world to see.
But it takes my breath away even more that I am the one person who gets to see what the world does not get to see.
You would think this would make her seem very ordinary to me.
But the opposite is happening: The longer I’m with my wife and the more I see of her, the more magical and mysterious she becomes.
This is why getting and staying married is such an act of faith and hope.
It takes believing that as someone becomes more familiar and ordinary, she can also become more potent and seductive. It takes believing that as something becomes more “everyday,” it can become “once in a lifetime.”
Grace and peace.