Last week, I got a phone call late Monday afternoon in my LA office. It was my boss in the Washington DC office. The short version was that there was a work emergency, and was there any chance I could get on a plane tomorrow morning to be in DC for…oh, two weeks or so? What could I say? I got on the plane. I’m supposed to be here until the end of the month, and that includes working on weekends.
On Saturday afternoon, after getting off work, I found out I wasn’t going to have to work on Sunday. I was talking to and mentioned this to my girlfriend, who lives about 400 miles away from where I am, and she was in her car within 15 minutes, starting a seven-hour drive to come see me. We were only together from about 11:30pm Saturday night until Monday morning until I had to go to work. And then she drove the seven hours back home. 14 hours of driving for about 31 hours of time together. I didn’t even ask for it; she just volunteered to do it. And she didn’t hesitate, except to make sure I wanted her company (as if that were ever in doubt). Needless to say, I was flabbergasted and feeling not just a little undeserving of such a gift. I’m still a bit incredulous.
I am a true believer that love is more about the little things than the grand gestures. But sometimes, the grand gestures are REALLY grand. I went from being a bit homesick and bored to being…just beyond happy to have her with me, even for that short a time. It meant so much to me for her to have gone through just to see me.
So, what have your significant others done for you that really felt above and beyond for you? Something that seemed so incredibly that you could never have asked for it – something they just did because of who they are and how strongly they felt about you? And if you think this thread sound like an excuse to brag about how awesome your SO is…well, you’d be right.
Sr. Olives supported me through five years of crippling depression and anxiety. He knew what he was getting into from the beginning. He remained calm when I was hysterical, dispensed my medications, kept sharp objects out of my reach, pulled me out of bed to shower and eat and basically just established himself as this rock in the early years of our relationship. And he helped me get better. He told me over and over how beautiful and smart and wonderful I am, and told me someday I would believe it. And he was right. As he predicted, I got better, and those times are now behind us.
I speak of this often as if he made this noble sacrifice for me, as if he saved me, as if he is my champion. Certainly other people see it that way, remarking on his patience and loyalty and nobility as I have. I’d be lying to say I don’t think of him as a little bit of a saint.
This consistent support during five difficult years is as grand a gesture as any, but it is actually an unfiltered comment about this gesture he made in a fit of anger several months ago that was the grandest gesture of all.
He is currently a graduate student of psychology. One day he came home pissed off. Apparently the subject of class that day was mental illness and partnership. Someone in the class remarked offhandedly that they didn’t understand why someone would stay with a person who was mentally ill.
As he recounted this to me, he wasn’t trying to flatter me or make me feel good, he was just caught up in this angry venting session and saying anything that came to mind. ‘‘I dunno,’’ he ranted. ‘‘Maybe they stay because they love that person and think they’re amazing and changed their life in ways they couldn’t imagine? I mean it’s not like I stayed with you as some noble sacrifice. I stayed with you because life is so much better with you in it.’’
And that’s when I got it. In his mind, it wasn’t about patience, perseverance, or sacrifice. By staying at my side during those years he pursued his own best self-interest. In his mind, those aren’t ‘‘dark times we must never speak of again.’’ They are just five more years he got to spend with me.
Two things, really. The Christmas before we got married (the one the year before, not the one 5 days before) he got me some stuff for my dog. The one I’d gotten without so much as a “Hey, guess what,” a couple months before. He doesn’t even much like dogs in the first place, and this particular dog had already chewed up a few things of his and angered his cat into peeing on things. But he got me stuff for her anyway because I loved her.
A few years later, we had a total shitstorm of a Christmas, and it wasn’t so much what he did (though he went way above and beyond), but his attitude about it all. It was the first Christmas we’d been able to come home in a couple years, and the first time I was going to see my baby niece. Should have been a wonderful holiday, except for two things that both happened the day before Christmas Eve–my family’s end of the state got 20" of snow, and my uncle finally lost his fight with lung cancer.
It was a horrible trip, even worse than it sounds on the face of it. The roads were bad enough I wanted to turn around and go back to his parents’, but he crawled through all that mess to get me to Grandma’s house. Played cards sitting between my mouth-breathing uncle and cousin who don’t bathe. And my aunt, the one whose husband had just died, wanted to open presents at her house that night, just like always. With the hospital bed still sitting there in the living room next to the tree. So he crawled through all that mess out into the countryside and opened presents sitting next to my dead uncle’s hospital bed. Blew a tire crawling home, and had to try to put on a spare in the pitch-ass black, with it 20 degrees outside and crap frozen into the wheel wells.
That night when we were laying in bed, I told him how much I appreciated everything he’d done that day. And he just looked at me like I was stupid and said, “Well, I’m your husband. That’s my job.”
When we were living in Seattle two years ago, a snowstorm hit. Our house was on a plateau about nine miles from town. Our driveway was pretty steep, so we weren’t going anywhere.
Until, that is, our friend called us to see if we could pick her, her husband, and their kid up- they’d been taking a relative to the airport, and their chains had cut a brakeline, stranding them in Redmond at 9pm. I told 'em I was on my way, put chains on my truck, and drove out to pick them up. I resigned myself to having to park on the street when I got home, since our driveway was so steep and the snow was coming down so hard.
Except when I got home, I found that my wife had shoveled the driveway, allowing me to get back into the garage. Now THAT’S love.
I’ve got two. The first happened a few months ago as we were deep in the planning stages of our wedding. I had lamented to him that one of the really fun things you get to do when planning a wedding is the tastings - tasting the cake choices, tasting the food from the caterers, tasting the champagne, etc. and that because we are having a destination wedding I didn’t get to do any of that. I had a list of cake flavors to choose from but no idea which to choose so we were looking around the city and we could not find a bakery that carried all 5 flavors of cake (well, they did, but never at the same time so we could taste them all together and talk about which we liked best in a single sitting) and as a surprise to me he called about 60 different bakeries until he found one that could do cupcakes in all 5 flavors and then went and picked them up and had them delivered to a friend’s house where we were going to a party later that night so when I sat down I was presented with all of the cake options at once! And he got lots of cupcakes so everyone at the party could taste everything too.
The other is more recent. We had a bad apartment situation going on and were thrust into a position where we had to find a new apartment, sign paperwork to get moved out of the old place and into the new place, pack, etc. in 10 days. I went out with an apartment finder and he was supposed to meet us but due to a down cable on a train track he wasn’t able to do so. I took pictures to show him and told him that I really liked this place and without seeing more than a picture he said we could sign paperwork to move in right away. He said he trusts me completely and believes that if I liked the place then it is probably a good place to live. We moved in this weekend and so far we have both been sublimely happy with the apartment and he has decided that from now on I am to be deferred to in all things housing related.
I have a wonderful husband, but my mom has the best story of this type:
When she met my father, she was recently divorced and had . . .a number of small children. The first time my dad met them, she pulled up to the curb in her Ford Fairlane and there they were in the back: four little kids, age 1-5, all with running noses and unhappy expressions on their faces. And my mom still has stars in her eyes when she tells how he took a deep breath and got in the car. Everything after that–the courting and proposing and so on-- was more or less a formality, and they’ve been married 35+ years now.
If I’m not prying too much, I’d like to hear more about this – it sounds like a neat story, but I don’t quite understand it. What were the circumstances around this first meeting? Was there a plan for them to meet up to date?
Marrying me made her a saint to be adored.
Staying married to my arrogant, bombastic ass for 20 years makes her a martyr to be worshipped.
Taking care of things I couldn’t reach while in a full body cast for 4 months?
Angel, for sure.
Suggesting we try the new “lifestyle” club in town? Words fail me.
He had exactly one day off in two weeks of work. He knew my parents were trying to find a friend or get their handyman involved to move a bed for a week from one house to the other.
Instead of spending the day lounging and relaxing, he calls my mom and volunteers to move the bed from my parents’ main house to their second home. Driving 6 hours in one day for basically gas $ and $20 compensation. An absolute saint in my mind.
My mom not so subtly hinted that we have her blessing to get hitched. I doubt it’ll come as a surprise to anyone once we do in a year.
Skipping the big stuff with the swelling orchestra score…
Here’s a little one that meant a lot. Early in our courting days some 20+ years ago, I drove by a local theater and noticed his car out in front. Theater was showing “The Hunt for Red October”, so I knew he was in seeing that, and the showing was almost over. I parked a few spaces away, grabbed a piece of scrap paper out of my car, wrote “Hey, turn around” on it and put it in under his wiper blade (in retrospect, this may have been a bad idea since I had no real assurance he wasn’t at the movie with someone else - fortunately for both of us he was not). He came out , walked to his car, read the note, looked around and looked very happy to see me (whew!).
So a couple years ago he was looking for something in his wallet and I noticed this little scrap of dog-eared paper tucked in with some business cards. I commented about his needing to clean out his wallet more often, and he showed it to me - yup, the scrap of paper I put on his windshield a couple decades before. Said he kept it because it was when he first thought that I might like him as much as he liked me. Big awwww.
Mrs. Cake, you reminded me of something I learned a little while ago. My husband and I met through an online dating site; we’ve been together for over 10 years now, and I discovered that he has kept every email I’ve ever sent him. He’s either very romantic, or he’s building an airtight case.
happy tears for the Olives