I recently attended a 50th Anniversary couple for an old English teacher of mine. I watched them together as he stood up everytime she did, and how he pulled her chair out at the table to allow her space to sit down. They must be in their 80s now and he is almost blind, but the love is still visible between them to any one that looks.
I approached her mid-way through the celebration to offer my congratulations. “How do you keep this up?” I asked her.
“This?” she asked. “You mean how do I keep loving him?”
“Oh no,” I said somewhat embarrassed, “I mean how do you keep your love so alive?”
“That,” she said, “is easy. A long time ago, I told him something. Just like I always had with my students, my husband and I had a word of the day. About 49 years ago we went through a time period where we were trying very hard to keep up with the neighbors and become more important than we were — newlywed/young couple style and I said to him, ‘the word of the day is unpretentious.’ And it stuck. It was our last word of the day as a couple, and the most important one we ever had. Even today, when one of us starts to act like something we are not and needs reminding, we will say to one another, ‘the word for the day is. . . ”
It is an interesting anecdote on many levels. The term unpretentious means to be genuine, and infers that it is to be comfortable with yourself, not trying to be someone else. In a relationship this would mean keeping it real. Not bad advice.
And what would your word for the day be?