Colorado Date Nights
Date nights have been such a regular thing the last few years for us, it was no great effort to gather together a few favorite pics from the smartphone. There were just so many of them.
The simple pleasure of another person’s company. In an age when meeting someone new is a simple matter of swiping left, rejection reasons and irreconcilable differences can be found in any one of a hundred modern day sociopolitical issues, and romantically trading up is a transaction as easily executed as any day trade after a few down days I’ve been lucky that happiness has always been a simple matter of slowing life down long enough to just share a meal. From the very first time I met Theresa in 1994, it has never been any more complicated than someone I wanted to be around wanted to be around me too. Thankfully neither one of us spent a lot of time dissecting whether we lived up to each other’s childhood image of what the perfect spouse looked like because as an inter-racial couple neither of us was. Nor did we much concern ourselves with whether the person we were with was an in demand commodity we were triumphantly taking off the market because neither of us was. The best decision I made in my life was made naively with childishly simple expectations and with little consideration with where it would get me.
Johnny Cash’s idea of a lover who “would love you for your life and nothing more” seems an increasigly inplausible prospect for my single friends who must contend with a far noisier world than existed when I met Theresa. Marriage is a highly personal thing, and while I have always lived as if the only marriage I cared about is the one I am in, it saddens me to see so many people lose themselves trying to live up to the expectational bombardment that surrounds us. We are all a product of the times in which we live, no matter how independent we think ourselves to be. It’s not always easy to shut out the influences and the messages, and the truth is there have been times when for us we briefly forgot how. When others fixated on career trajectory, material trappings, and the current score in the power politics of life-sharing, Theresa has always been pleasant, accessible, uncomplicated, and in the moment despite the world around us and sometimes when I have not.
When you have been married twenty-two years, you can kid with one another about topics that would arouse suspicion and torpedo a relationship in the early days of dating. Theresa kids that if I somehow suddenly found myself without her, she would have successfully taught me how live happily were I to start over. The truth is that the lesson is already being applied. ALL my successful friendships are just like my marriage because I learned from Theresa how to enjoy moments. My friends are cherished sources of experiences, not to be used, but to be enjoyed, and my prayer for the world, is that everyone find this wherever they look.
Matthew Gilmartin, Roxborough (Littleton) CO