Mediaboss Marketing

I have been married three times, and I would like to think that makes me equipped to tell the difference between love and lust. Most of us realise we are in love in the most unromantic of situations. For me, it was when I was heavily pregnant, had severe vertigo and had just vomited in the doctors surgery.

Ive wet myself, I announced a few minutes later, mortified and weeping in the passenger seat of my husbands prized black VW Golf, convinced he was ready to jump ship.

Its OK, darling, he whispered, leaning over to buckle my belly into the seat. In that moment, I knew that this really was love. It wasnt that I didnt think I loved him before, but age had altered the way I felt about things. I had said it to someone else before, and it hadnt worked out, and I wondered what that elusive glue was that kept couples happy together for ever.

I was 39, and he was 48. We had been together for three years, marrying seven months after wed met. We had both been in relationships that had changed us. They had shaped us into people who could build a life together.

My husband and I come from similar backgrounds: our mothers were both raised in Karachi and we grew up speaking English and Urdu, navigating what it meant to be of Pakistani heritage in Britain, and Muslim. Despite these similarities, we chose different ends of the spectrum of life as our starting points He went backpacking across the globe in his 20s; I got married.

He used to describe himself as a liberal libertarian, open to all the experiences of life. I was an uptight, conservative Muslim woman, who was once nicknamed the runaway bride because I had left two arranged marriages. He spent his life avoiding girls like me, and if wed met earlier it would never have worked. Ironically, it was the very things that I thought would put someone off me that he had liked: I had a juicy past, I had lived on the edges of acceptability, albeit reluctantly, and I had nothing to hide.

I often ask him what made him pursue me. I fancied you, he says. It never fails to raise a smile, because who doesnt want to be lusted after? I never knew how nice it would be to be with someone who speaks Urdu, he once added, thoughtfully.

Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity says, Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure. For my husband and me, our diversity of thought brings the adventure, and the familiarity of our experiences offers security. It has been the bridge between lust and love.

Single friends ask how I knew I could trust that it would be different this time, how I knew that he was the one; the answer is that I didnt. I just knew what I wanted my life to look like, and I could see he wanted the same, and that was what made it worth taking the risk. So, I made myself vulnerable. Life had taught me that whatever happened, I would handle it.

It is always in the most ordinary moments that I have felt extraordinary love for my husband. Like the Valentines Day after our first child was born, when I was breastfeeding in bed, exhausted from motherhood. He brought me a cup of tea and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps my favourite. I cried. It was confirmation that he knew me, the tiny things about me, like the way I take my tea, or the fact that I dont like sultanas in scones, or the kind of things I watch on TV.

My Nani used to say that it takes 20 years to fall in love, and I would laugh at her practicality, teasing her about whether she had ever really loved her husband, since she had become a widow at 35. But she always smiled when she spoke of my grandfather. Her marriage had been arranged when she was 18, so there hadnt been a long courtship.

I now understand that she was teaching me about true love, that it grows with the years of incremental kindness. Its a lesson I am reminded of every time my husband hands me a cup of tea at the end of a long day.

Read the original here:
Three marriages have taught me what true love looks like a cup of tea and some cheese and onion crisps - The Guardian