Love Looks Like
I don’t know what day of the week it was. Perhaps a Tuesday, because it had a mundane normalness about it, lacking in the let’s-do-this of a Monday and the we’re-nearly-there of a Thursday. The college library epitomised a moody afternoon in February with grey everything and cold everything and the computer room was heavy with assignment stress and sleepy students.
Paddy, my ‘friend’, soon-to-be boyfriend, later-to-be-husband, proposed a game of pool to the group. I paused and looked up from my computer, waiting to see if I was included in the afternoon’s procrastination activity of choice.
One by one, the yeses and nods and ‘one moment, let me finish this’ comments came in. Someone suggested playing ‘doubles’, and two other friends paired up. Paddy made the announcement I had been waiting for: I was on his team.
When we won, we hugged. And when we lost, we didn’t hug. I hoped we would win.
I don’t know who made the rules, but a few months later Paddy confessed to initiating doubles so he could inhale the scent of my hair when we hugged. That was sneaky, I teased, trying not to feel insecure about how often I used dry-shampoo. He shrugged with a bashful but unashamed smirk.
Said smirk became familiar. Lying on the floor on a Sunday afternoon, swamped in a sea of blankets, and my four year old wedged in the middle of us, Paddy would sneak his hand into mine and I’d catch the same look.
Extravagant, in-your-face dates called for a babysitter and money, of which this single mother and university student had none. So we became proficient in our sneaky love.
I was the friend who invited him to church so I could spend time with him. He was the friend who said yes to coming to church so he could tire out my four year old. I was the girlfriend who put a surprise £3 in his bank account for caffeinated assignment fuel, and I became the fiance who left spaghetti bolognese at his student halls. He was the boyfriend who got the bus to my house and vacuumed while I was at work, and he became the fiance who did the bedtime routine before I even realised it was bedtime. We’re the husband and wife who have been flirting in code over games of bug bingo, long before our son ever called him ‘Daddy’.
Our love is, and always has been, quiet. Ordinary. Sneaked into the delicate, hidden crevices of our days. Slipping in quickly; blink and you’ll miss it.
It looks like; “I left the last piece of chocolate for you,” or a mischievous tap on the bum while the unsuspecting recipient carries laundry up the stairs . Except, Paddy is almost always the chocolate-leaver and I am almost always the chocolate-eater (and also the bum tapper).
It looks like scooping up the child shackled to my ankles without a word, or the freshly cleaned kitchen worktop, also without a word.
It looks like a wedding with ten people on the very first day some lockdown restrictions were lifted, in the tiniest garden of a church, down a hidden side street in East Belfast. (Sneaky, right?) If we hadn’t still been in the eye of the covid-hurricane, it may have gone unnoticed.
Two years later, our love still looks like a hand-squeeze while changing car gears, and dizzying kisses sneaked in while loading the dishwasher.
While we were once ‘just friends’, we were never ‘just us’. And we don’t know what our love looks like outside of children and parenting. I have never once wished to change our love story, but I have on one or more occasions, wondered if our love would be different. What is it like to meet your person before you meet your kids? Did we or are we missing out? Would we even be together if I hadn’t been a mother, and he hadn’t been attracted to those qualities in me?
My dear husband doesn’t humor my frivolous questions and non-existent answers, because in the words of an artist I never thought I would quote but I know Paddy will love it, we skipped to the good bit (Rizzle Kicks, 2013).
A long-married friend once told me it took her longer than she cares to admit to see the quiet love right in front of her, instead of looking back at the loud love behind her. The Author of Love himself isn’t always so extravagant about it. Sure, His love oftens looks like miracle manna rained down from heaven, but sometimes it looks like the divine Son of God sneaking in to eat dinner at the not-so-divine table of typical, unexciting humans. To the nourishment of His body, and the nourishment of their souls. Sometimes ‘ordinary’ is even more magical.
Our love wouldn’t be any different; we just got a head start.
Because love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy or boast. And love is sneaky.
