A Letter on Being Comfortably in Love
My Dearest Friend,
There is something recognizable about new love.
I noticed it recently while sitting in a crowded theater beside my husband, waiting for a comedy show to begin. Around us were couples in all the various postures people take when they are out together, and every so often I found myself looking at one and thinking, Oh, they seem new.
There is a particular kind of awareness that exists early in love. You are conscious of the person beside you almost constantly...of where their hand is, whether their shoulder is touching yours, of every unnecessary inch of space between you. A hand reaches for another hand. Bodies lean toward one another. There is an eagerness to be close that seems to make its way into even the smallest movements.
I remember that kind of love. And sitting there beside Beloved, I realized ours does not look quite like that anymore.
My hand was resting on his thigh. His arm was stretched comfortably across the back of my chair. Neither of us had made any particular effort to arrange ourselves that way, and I could not have told you when my hand landed there or when his arm settled behind me. We were simply touching because, after years of sharing a life, that is where we naturally landed...and I think there is something wonderfully romantic about that.
We have shared enough life now for me to know that love has seasons...enough to have watched ours change shape more than once. There have been seasons when we could not seem to get enough of one another and seasons when our lives required us to spend months apart. Seasons of babies and sleepless nights, TDYs and command, career changes and moves. Seasons when we had time for long conversations and spontaneous plans, and seasons when our best attempt at intentional time together was forty-five minutes curled against one another watching a show before someone inevitably fell asleep.
The last few months have been one of those fuller seasons. We moved our family across an ocean. We unpacked a home. We settled children into new routines and one of them into another new school. We filled our evenings with soccer practices and our days with appointments, errands, commitments, and all the thousand small tasks required to make an unfamiliar place begin to feel ordinary.
This week, one of those children spent an entire day sick and throwing up on me.
Through all of it, Beloved and I have still been here. We talk on the drive home from soccer. We curl up together when we can carve out an hour. We reach for each other in bed. We exchange the observations and complaints and ridiculous thoughts that accumulate over the course of a day. We pass responsibilities back and forth, compare schedules, talk about the children, and eventually collapse into bed beside one another before getting up and doing it all again. We have continued being husband and wife beneath all the other things we have needed to be.
We were never lost.
But somewhere between moving boxes and school schedules and bedtime routines, there had not been much space lately to simply enjoy being us. Not to solve something together or accomplish something or get someone where they needed to be...just to spend a few hours together because we genuinely enjoy one another's company.
Then, this week, there was.
For the first time since before we left our last duty station, we went on a proper date. Not an evening when someone watched the children so we could unpack without interruption. Not a stolen bit of time while visiting family. An actual date...just us.
We walked through the city without calculating whether little legs could manage the distance or whether someone needed a snack. We went somewhere entirely inappropriate for our children. We sat together in a dark theater and laughed until my husband's Duolingo app loudly announced itself near the end of the comedy show, prompting the comedian to stop mid-joke, identify the offending app, and turn my husband's forgotten notification into part of his set. (I have rarely been more grateful for a dark theater than I was while feeling the heat rise into my cheeks.)
And somewhere in those hours, between walking through the city and laughing beside him, I found myself thinking about how much I like this version of us. Not because we had finally found our way back to something we had lost...because we hadn't lost it.
Date night did not revive our marriage. It simply gave us enough room to notice it.
There is a phrase people sometimes use about relationships that has always sounded vaguely ominous to me: They got comfortable.
Comfortable is not always meant kindly. It can imply complacency...that somewhere along the way we stopped noticing one another, stopped making an effort, stopped doing the things we once did because affection became assumed. Familiarity, in that version of the story, is something to guard against. As though knowing another person too well inevitably makes them less interesting. As though the ordinary nature of a shared life must eventually dull whatever made us reach for one another in the first place.
But I don't think comfort has to mean any of those things. There is another kind of comfortable.
There is the comfort of knowing exactly how another person's hand feels in yours and the ease of silence that does not immediately need to be filled. There is knowing which joke will make him laugh before you have finished telling it, which look across a crowded room means Are you seeing this too?, and which small shift in his expression means there is something he will tell you later when you are alone. There is the comfort of sitting beside one another without needing to wonder what the other person is thinking about you.
There is the comfort of being known.
The person beside me has seen me through childbirth and grief, exhaustion and anger, moves and mistakes, good years and difficult days. He knows what I look like dressed for a date and what I look like after spending a day being vomited on by a sick toddler. He knows the polished versions of me and the decidedly less polished ones...and I know his, too.
Perhaps that is what struck me most as I watched those other couples around us. I did not envy them, and I did not wish we could rewind ourselves to the beginning.
New love was wonderful. There was excitement in discovering one another, in learning what made the other laugh, in the electricity of every new touch and the endless desire to close the space between us. There are pieces of that beginning I can still remember with startling clarity, and I would never diminish what was beautiful about them simply because we are no longer there.
But I like knowing him...and I like being known.
I like that somewhere along the way, the person I once could not stop thinking about became the person whose presence is so thoroughly woven into my life that sometimes I do not consciously notice all the ways I am still reaching for him. A hand finds a thigh in a dark theater. An arm settles behind a chair. A glance catches across a room and carries an entire conversation without either of us saying a word.
The reaching did not disappear. It simply became familiar.
The Lesson
Love does not have to remain new to remain alive.
There is a temptation to measure romance by intensity...how often we go out, how much we touch, how eagerly we miss one another, how much visible effort we are putting into keeping the spark alive. And when love settles into something quieter, it can be easy to wonder whether settling itself is the problem.
But perhaps some kinds of love are meant to settle. Not into neglect...into belonging.
Comfort does not have to be the place where we stop trying. It can be what grows when two people have spent enough time learning one another that closeness begins to carry an ease it could not have had in the beginning.
There is still intention here. We still make the reservation and find the babysitter. We still turn toward one another at the end of long days. We still apologize when we get it wrong, make space when one of us needs more, and choose the small opportunities to belong to one another in a life that constantly asks us to belong to everyone else. Comfort does not absolve us from tending love...it simply changes some of the ways that tending looks.
Marriage still ebbs and flows. There are weeks when we seem to move naturally toward one another and weeks when the logistics of our lives take nearly everything we have. There are date nights and sick children, evenings spent dressed up together and evenings when one of us falls asleep halfway through the show we promised we would finally finish. There are stretches when we have more to give each other and stretches when love exists mostly in the grace we extend when there simply isn't much left.
The quieter seasons do not frighten me. I know there will be room again.
Not because we disappear from one another in the meantime, but because this is what a shared life does. It expands and contracts around everything we are asked to carry. Sometimes there are whole evenings that belong only to us, and sometimes closeness has to live inside the ordinary rhythm of everything else.
Neither one makes us more married. Love remains inside them both.
To the Spouse Who Wonders if Comfortable Is Enough
If your love does not look the way it did in the beginning, that does not necessarily mean something has been lost.
Perhaps something has simply changed.
Perhaps the butterflies have quieted because the person who once made your heart race has also become the person beside whom your heart knows how to rest. Perhaps the conversations are different because there is less left to discover about one another and so much more that you have discovered together. Perhaps you do not notice every time you reach for one another anymore because somewhere along the way, reaching became ordinary.
There can be romance in getting dressed up and walking hand in hand through a city, and there can be romance in the quieter places, too...in the conversation that wanders nowhere in particular, in the familiar body beside yours at the end of the day, in the hand that finds its resting place on a knee without either of you thinking very much about how it got there.
Comfort should not make us careless with the people we love. Familiarity should never become permission to stop seeing them, and certainty should never become an excuse to take their presence for granted.
But neither should we mistake familiarity for indifference.
There is something beautiful about loving someone long enough that affection can become unselfconscious. There is something beautiful about being known without having to explain yourself from the beginning. There is something beautiful about realizing that the love you once experienced as exhilarating and new has been allowed to grow into something familiar without becoming something less.
Maybe that is what being comfortably in love really is.
Not a love that has stopped changing, but a love that has been given enough time, enough ordinary days, enough laughter and exhaustion and distance and homecomings, to become a place where two people know how to rest...and still, without thinking much about it, reach for one another.
