What love looks like in real life
Forget the engagement photos
With Valentine’s Day on tap this week, there will be plenty of words and images celebrating love (which will be a welcome counterbalance to a lot of other stuff out there). In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if your feed is full of things that look like engagement photos.
The images from an engagement photo shoot can be gorgeous. But if I had to find photos to illustrate my experiences of love in real life, the pictures I’d choose wouldn’t be quite so photogenic. I thought it might be fun to celebrate Valentine’s Day with three little stories about what love really looks like in real life.
Love is going places you don’t really want to go
My first example of love in real life involves the TV show “The Waltons.” If you don’t know this TV show (and you really should), the long-running series from the 1970s centers on John-Boy and his large extended family struggling through the Great Depression in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It’s one of my all-time favorites.
My husband and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary with a long weekend in Virginia. While scanning the list of attractions near our Charlottesville hotel, I discovered we were only an hour from Schuyler, the tiny hamlet where Earl Hamner, the creator of “The Waltons,” grew up. How lucky were we to be only a stone’s throw from the real John-Boy’s hometown?
My husband was not as pumped about this since he doesn’t identify as a Waltons fan. However, he good-naturedly agreed to a slight detour so that I could make a Waltons pilgrimage.
As you might suspect, Schuyler is not a well-known tourist destination, and there wasn’t much to see there. But we did get to drive past the Hamner family farmhouse (seen above).
I had hoped to at least reward my husband with an ice cream cone from the general store that was the basis for its counterpart, Ike Godsey’s General Merchandise, on the show. But alas, we discovered a fire had reduced Schuyler’s general store to a pile of rubble.
A similarly disappointed trio of tourists pulled up in their pickup truck while we were taking these photos (at least I wasn’t the only one devoted to a Waltons pilgrimage). They tried to console us by inviting us to a tractor pull later that day. Though we didn’t take them up on their offer, this small gesture made our day.
Sometimes love is going places you don’t necessarily care about going yourself because it will bring your beloved joy. And would you believe that on another trip to Virginia to mark our 20th wedding anniversary, my husband agreed to return to Schuyler because they had opened an actual Walton’s Mountain Museum by then? This, my friends, is love.
Love is embracing your beloved’s family (and going places you don’t really want to go with them)
The next example of what love looks like in real life finds my husband on a hunting trip with my father. As you can see, it doesn’t exactly look like he is having the time of his life. (To be fair, even Max the dog doesn’t look stoked, and he lived for this sort of thing.)
A day of hunting pheasants was never on my husband’s bucket list, but when my father invited him, he went. He knew my dad would enjoy having a buddy at the game farm. And he knew that making my father happy would make me happy.
Though my husband didn’t become my dad’s regular hunting buddy, he’s found other ways to be a good sport. My dad keeps his two horses at our place, and sometimes my husband rides with him so my dad isn’t always the lone horseman.
They say that when you marry someone, you marry their family too, for better or worse. One way to make it for better is by loving their family too.
Love is supporting your beloved when they pull a 180
My last example of what love looks like in real life finds me looking a little perplexed in this photo from my first Easter as a mother of two. Perhaps I was pondering which is harder—being a working mom or being home full-time with the kids.
When baby number two came along, I told my husband I would like to stay home full-time with the kids for a while, and he said that would be fine. Not long after I started living out this dream, I realized I was totally miserable. Nevertheless, I felt like I had to stick with my plan because, as I told him while I cried on his shoulder after one very long day, “I did this to me.”
My husband refused to let me be stuck. In fact, unbeknownst to me, he had already talked to the director of the childcare center my older daughter had been attending and arranged for her to continue attending two days a week until I got my legs under me. He also encouraged me to investigate whether I could consult for my former employer part-time.
After more weeping, I realized that maybe my husband was right—staying at home with the kids didn’t have to be all or nothing. Gradually we worked together to craft a solution: I worked two days a week while the girls went to the childcare center.
Sometimes love is a taller order, like helping your beloved figure things out when they discover they don’t want what they thought they did.
If you are lucky enough to find yourself starring in your own love story, you will undoubtedly come away with a similar collection of photos illustrating what love looks like. They may not be pretty, but I bet they’ll be just as precious to you.
You are so right about true love ❤️
This is beautiful, Joanne. They really don't tell you what it will be like or how the small things will mean the most.