CHOCOLATE-CAKE LOVE
Honestly, Saint Valentine’s Day was not a big deal for me growing up (just like Halloween). Possibly because these holidays are the target of commercialism, and I grew up in a place where people seldom had enough money to spend on non-essentials. Unfortunately, when a serious concept, such as love, is promoted as having a price-tag, its meaning is eroded.
I remember sitting in a class for young married couples once. The pastor was explaining the difference between the love we feed because of our own want, and the love we give without receiving a benefit. He used this example -
“I often say that I love chocolate cake. But my wife corrected me, saying — ‘No, you love yourself, and chocolate cake pleases you.’”
I never forgot that lesson — for although we should do unto others as we like them to do for us — we should also do them good, even if they don’t repay us in kind. It made me wonder -
“How will I know the difference?”
Some people go through so much pain to be loved. They change the ways they think, feel, and look, just to be accepted by the one they hope will love them back. Sometimes, they even give up their dreams, because they don’t fit in with the plans of another. The rejection we experience feeds in us a dislike for our own self, and we continue to evolve in all sorts of ways, until we don’t know who we really are anymore! That is how much we desire to be loved.
Still, love requires intimacy, which means getting to know one another. We may love someone without understanding them, but we can’t love someone we don’t know. If we pretend to be someone else to be liked, then the person being liked is not really us, and that road leads to loneliness. Compromising is a healthy component of an intimate relationship. But that comes after intimacy and trust. We change because we love, not to be loved.
Here is a radical truth I learned about love –
“When you say yes to starting a relationship, you are saying yes to all the things that person is — the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
First of all, why begin a relationship with someone you don’t like or can accept? Secondly, how do you know it is in your power to change them? Third, what about the things they don’t like about you — are you willing to change for them? The bottom line is –
“Do you really love chocolate cake, or just the satisfaction that eating it brings?”
LOVE IS A CHOICE
Love is an action, rather than a sensation. It engages more than the heart — it awakens the mind and claims the soul. Indeed, it endures even when life does not. It is one of the greatest perks of eternity! All the dimensions of our Self must work together to make it flourish. It is no wonder we can’t ever get it quite right.
Saying that love is a choice does not mean we are robots, adding pros and cons and arriving at some logical conclusion. Sometimes, love defies common sense. But we choose to invest our best efforts to watch it grow, and patiently learn how it needs to be nurtured. It is a commitment to work on protecting it until the end.
Since the Bible says that — “God is love” — we can agree that it exists in the realm of the eternal, and therefore, it’s complex and mysterious. It is an all-encompassing endeavor, which works itself out as it pushes us to evolve. And no matter how much time goes by, or how much you’ve already learned, there is always a new depth to its reality.
MY LOVE STORY
In order to explain the absurdity of my tale, I must begin with my childhood. My parents divorced when I was three, so I never lived in a conventional home. In fact, I lived in many different places and with different relatives throughout my life. Then, my mom died in a tragic accident, which left me rather broken for most of the rest of my life.
When I was seven, I thought Captain Von Trapp was dreamy — the immature hero trained by Maria in the “Sound of Music.” By the time the world had broken my heart into bits, I began to imagine stories along the lines of my favorite womanizer — James Bond. I had no designs on marriage and swore I would never make such a choice for myself.
When I was twenty, in my third year of Advertisement, the American Army invaded my country, and the world I’ve known ceased to exist. It was 1989, right before Christmas. At the end of January, one of my high school girlfriends invited me to go on a double date with her. She had been dating an American soldier, who happened to have a roommate. A large group was taking a boat to a nearby island — the type I had never been to, because I could not afford to pay the plane fare. I’ve heard rumors of its white sands and clear waters, so it didn’t take a lot to convince me to go.
The young soldier was more interested in scuba-diving than in laying on the beach. Thus, when we arrived to the island, he did his thing, while I did mine. I was not a boy-crazy sort of girl, and I had no interest in getting to know him better, though I agreed to a picture of us together, as a token of my thanks for the gift of the trip.
But there were other forces at hand. A storm rocked the boat, making me very ill. These circumstances led me to discover the sort of man this soldier was — caring and thoughtful — and ready to do whatever he could to help me. Suddenly, his light green eyes began to warm up my heart.
The trip took place on January 30th, 1990. On that February 14th, he asked me to become his wife. Around the end of March, he had convinced me of his sincerity. So, I began to pray. For me, marrying this man was against everything I’d come to believe about life and love until then. Most of my youth had been consumed by negative experiences and ruled by depression. I had been looking for reasons to stay alive and constantly struggled to find them.
At this point in my life, this decision could be the portal to a wonderful future, or the end of my entire world, for I didn’t have the strength to keep fighting the odds. I really felt that God was in on this — so I took the plunge — and said yes! We were married May 3rd, 1990. That was 34 years ago today!
Before Rob came into my life, I didn’t believe there was anything desirable or worthy about me. But he seemed to see something in me, which I could not grasp. It wasn’t a physical attraction, though we were both attracted to each other. It wasn’t sentimentality either — for I would have none of that! But if I was sentimental, I would say that –
“My hungry heart called out to him from eternity, searching for a dream to change my reality.”
It was clear that Rob was not trying to have his cake and eat it — he really loved me. Our lives have not been filled with unicorns and rainbows. As expected, our love flourished because of all the hard work we invested in it. To this day, the most beautiful thing to me was not that he asked me to marry him all those years ago, but rather that he actively loved me every day since.
“That’s TRUE LOVE 💘!”
Robert Alan Richmond, III — you are an incredible man! You are the one just for me, and I’m so glad I’m yours. You have never tried to change me, no matter how weird I am. Because of that, I learned to love you the same way. Even now, we continue to change and learn to love each other in new and deeper ways.
“THANK YOU FOR A LIFETIME OF LOVE!”
I don’t know how much time we have ahead of us, but I know you are the only one I want by my side.
Te amo con todo mi corazón ❤️🔥
