Celebrating twenty one years of marriage with love

Today my husband and I are celebrating twenty one years of marriage. Twenty one years of challenges. Twenty one years of growth. Twenty one years of dedication and more importantly twenty one years of an enduring love.

Someone asked me yesterday when I told her my anniversary was today whether I loved my husband in the same way I did when I first met him. And I immediately said love changes as do we. Love grows as do we. Love can only be what we allow it to be. What we are capable of giving.

When my husband and I first met our eyes met across a crowded room and we locked on each other like there was no one else in that room. I remember the magnetism I felt. The giddiness I felt. The sense of being connected through this man’s eyes to a place I had been before but had no memory of until our eyes met. And then in a split second our moment of familiarity and connection faded back into space and time. Dropping me back in the moment of going back to buying a sandwich. I remember shaking my head to bring myself back to reality.

He walked away from me that day after we exchanged a few words without looking back. But his presence haunted me for many months until we were to meet again. Again I walked into a crowded room and as soon as I entered the room, I felt his presence and he mine. Our eyes locking again across the crowded room. A heat rising through me as if our souls were uniting. Trembling under the weight of the knowingness. By the time I got across the room, he had disappeared. Vanished into thin air. The feeling of this mysterious man haunting me even more.

And then when it was time, we met for the first time in the Bombay Bicycle Club for an Indian dinner and our love began even though we did not know it at the time. At the time neither one of us was looking for love. Having been hurt before. Having developed a cynicism toward love. We had closed our hearts so we thought but the Universe had other plans for us. Plans for us to be together.

Twin flames, we are. From opposite spectrums of the world both literally and figuratively. He from the cold and dark North of England. Me from sunny and light Bermuda. He from an Anglo Saxon background. Me from a mixed up black Bermudian background. He never dating a black woman before. Me having dated one white man just before I met my husband. Neither of us expecting anything from the other. Or thinking we would be together.

But there is something about love. About fate. About paths that cannot be denied when they are divined by the One Source. When twin flames are brought together as my husband and I, we are being challenged to find the middle ground always. To balance each other out. He is water. I am fire.

So when we argue and disagree, we really can be explosive. Not physically but on a deep and hurting emotional level.  Sometimes taking a while for us to see eye to eye but when we emerge from that period of learning to balance each other, we emerge stronger, wiser, more appreciative of the other. Full of a new level of love.

Now we can look back over our twenty one years and see because of the work we are constantly putting into ourselves as individuals as well as into our marriage as a couple, we are raising children who see that life is not a bed of roses all the time. That sometimes those roses that are so beautiful have thorns but if they can look beyond the thorns, they will see the beauty of the rose. The beauty of love. That the only thing that matters in life is love. Not superficial surface love but deep love that comes from the soul. Love that endures. Love that weathers the storms. Pulling us along with it.

Swirling and twirling. Spinning us round and round. Sometimes up. Sometimes down but when  there is respect and faith, there is nothing like the love that grows and changes as we do. Ebbs and flows. To be in the present moment. Forgetting about the hurts of the past and not worrying about what is to come next.

Today is a day when my husband and I celebrate more than 21 years of marriage together. It is a day when we celebrate love. Our twin flames. In gratitude for finding each other and helping each other to become the best we can be while raising children to be as caring and as loving as they can be.

Happy Anniversary to my twin flame. The man who did not fit my bill of what the perfect man was to look like but who turned my heart upside down and showed me that love does not come when we put expectations around us. When we shut our hearts and our eyes to the path of enduring love.

With love and grace to my man. My confidante. My lover. And enemy at times. But mostly my partner and father of my children. There is no power greater than the power of love.