Home is Where the Heart Belongs

Life gets in the way.

Marie likes a show on the Oxygen network called Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood. I like to watch it with her, one of a dozen or so shows we watch together. Good TV can spark dialogue and togetherness. It's a little like a baseball game. There are these spaces in the action you can fill with talk and companionable silences, and the action on the screen makes a nice backdrop to learning a little more about each other, how you feel and what you need and what you like.

Despite the trappings of celebrity Tori and Dean come across as genuine and engaging people, with the same real struggle to make love stay that we all face in our demanding and compartmentalized lives.

In a recent episode Dean came home from working out of town promoting a film he'd been in. Tori showed him a keepsake she'd found while cleaning a drawer, two airsickness bags from the early days of their love, on which they'd written together a bucket list of their hopes and dreams for each other. On alternating lines they'd written tender promises, to have lots of babies, to have sex once a week in dangerous places, to kiss on the beach in Hawaii and share a romantic dinner in a villa in Italy. Tori had framed the bags, sweet beginnings scrawled on the only paper handy, scrawled in pen on a romantic trip when every moment seemed hopeful and alive. Through the blessings of fame and money they'd achieved many of the goals, but now after two babies and a jewelry line and motorcycle racing and their careers and child rearing and their show they'd reached a place where a distance had grown between them. The stresses and demands of ordinary living have broken an awful crack in their happiness. "Life gets in the way," Dean said. "Tori and I are growing apart, and I hate it."

Every day we face dozens of competing choices, small and nagging ones that obscure our brightest intentions. Evil tries to obscure the light in our lives and choke our hopes. We become starved and thirsty, and vulnerable to temptations that will turn a problem into a crisis and poison everything we ever hoped for. We forget that we have the power to let go of misery and regret and live. There are no shortcuts. Love is something you claim and keep. But in the moment of realization and in the steady practice of right choices, a joy can be earned that nothing can replace.

Life gets in the way of living. We don't mean for this to happen but it does. Our joy and magic are overrun by the noxious weeds of misery and regret, of making do and getting things done. Time runs away from us. The pressure to perform and keep up and meet everyone else's expectations overwhelm our deepest needs. Essential things get ignored for trivial obligations. We hurt inside out of unmet need, a cyst of anger forms near our heart.

The challenge is to maintain the balance, to keep the keepsakes in their frame. At all costs we have to avoid the fatal error of ignoring the essential amidst the loud and persistent demands of the mundane. Take time to hold the one you love and be held. Whisper to her how important she is, how delighted you are in her. Reclaim the magic. The excitement hasn't left, it has just been replaced with something deeper and more enduring. A diamond has to be cleaned and polished. Without the proper care the luster is lost under a layer of neglect. Polish away the neglect. With embraces. With tenderness. With affirmation and acknowledgement..

We have to refuse to let the stresses and demands of ordinary living crowd out the joy and magic. We have to reclaim the adventure and excitement, and find it in each other. Too often we suffer in silence when we long to kiss in eagerness and belonging. Be the first to apologize. Make the first move and the second and the third. Reach out. Say what you want. For too long the person we long for more than anything in the world has been half a bed away, and it might as well have been ten thousand miles. Hope seems distant when love is broken. Every beat of our heart is a drumbeat of emptiness on a forlorn march. The wall between us seems higher than our hopes can reach, or so it seems in the agonizing silence. Nothing aches like an unmet touch.

To see Tori and Dean struggle so honestly is lovely and inspiring. I hope they make it. I believe they will. And I know I will never stop loving my wife, or telling her how glad I am she is near me. Today is a good day. We are going to Old Country Buffet for breakfast, and there will be laughter and unlimited bacon. Both are a tonic to our souls. Nobody is richer than we are this morning, not even on the veranda of a villa in Italy.