Falling in love

Editors note: This is the second essay in a six-part series celebrating our Year of Jubilee, 50 years of marriage in June 2024.

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When Katie and I met, I was 16, early enrolled in college long before early enrollment was a thing. I had entered college early, on the basis of test scores, but I was socially immature, punching above my weight class with girls.

It’s safe to say it was not love at first sight, if there even is such a thing. I was loud and she was not. I was trying to draw attention to myself and she wanted to be invisible. Sometimes we’re still like that.

We went to a conservative Christian college in Chattanooga, Tennessee where you had to have a chaperon on a date, and the first time I went out with Katie she was the chaperone and I was dating her room mate. But we shared friends and we become friends, long before we were lovers. There were some things l liked about her, but there were also things I liked about several of the other young women I knew. There was a lot I had to learn.

I do remember seeing her fall asleep studying in the library one night, and I offered to buy her a cup of coffee in the Happy Corner, the campus cafe. Hers, black, and mine with cream. I was working as a youth director in my Dad’s church in nearby Hixson and would occasionally ask her to hang out with the girls in the youth group.

On the way to one of our first dates I had a serious automobile accident and asked the nurse in the ER to call her and let her know I couldn’t get there. Apparently, the nurse failed to communicate the gravity of the situation because Katie didn’t even check on me in the hospital until a few days later. But little by little we came to trust each other, sharing more and more of our hearts and our goals. We actually listened to each other, which was a big step. I grew up a little; she learned to laugh at some of my jokes.

When we were juniors I transferred to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Then, in her senior year, she transferred to a Bible institute in New York. It was right before that, I think, that I fell in love. It was a warm summer night in Tennessee. She had come to a picnic with my family at a park on Signal Mountain to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Afterward I stood waiting for her as she walked toward my little red Camaro, balancing on the curbs in the parking lot, her arms spread out to keep her balance.

She was taking such delight in such a small thing— and I think that’s what hooked me. It could have been her long light brown hair with blond highlights, of course, or her deep blue eyes, although it turned out she was wearing colored contacts. No, it was definitely walking on the curbs. There was a simplicity about her that I knew I needed then. And still do.

Later that summer I traveled to Europe as part of a mission team, and the next year she was in New York. I came to miss her, and we talked often on the phone, back when it cost more by the minute to do so than it does now. It was that longing I felt from which my decision to propose emerged. I had a degree. I had a job. I was ready for a wife. Or at least thought I was. As I said, I had much to learn.

When did she fall in love? About ten years later. We had two kids by then and were living with my sister-in-law in Litchfield, Michigan. We had moved from Tennessee where I was teaching to get my Ph.D. at Michigan State University. I was essentially unemployed for a year, doing some part-time work as an adjunct at the community college and working as a correspondent for the local newspaper.

So I had time to be at home. With her. With the kids. Walks. Parks. Museums. Our first ten years had not had much of that. I had been working two stressful jobs and had not learned to value the time I had with Katie. Or even to make the time. But that year I was emotionally available and she needed that. This is when she says she fell in love with me. This is not when she began to love me, however. Falling in love and loving someone turn out to be entirely different things. C.S Lewis puts it this way:

Love in this sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

In this sense, we loved each other from the day in December 1973, when we committed to marry each other. It was an act of the will, a choice we made and sealed with a covenant on June 8, 1974. Love turned out to be more important than being in love. Lewis again:

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years?

You can love someone without the flurry of passion or excitement our culture often mistakes for the real thing. Every day we love each other. Some days we are also in love.

We set our love on each other 50 years ago. Since then we have loved each other even when we didn’t feel like it. This love has carried us through the challenges of caring for parents and neighbors at end of life, raising four children, and health challenges of our own. Because we love each other, we have encouraged each other through ministry and vocational achievements and disappointments, celebrating and commiserating when needed.

But there were many days I can say we were definitely not “in love.” Frankly, there were days we didn’t even like each other. We did love each other, however, in that higher and nobler sense of purposeful covenant-keeping. And as we grow older, I’ve found we are in love more often than not, emotionally available to each other as we were that one brief year back in Litchfield, more aware and attuned to the rhythms of our hearts than ever before.

I often tell Katie I am madly in love with her. And she responds, “But do you love me?” It’s an important question. It’s always nice when being in love and loving each other occur simultaneously, of course.

But one is more important than the other.

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Next month—Making a home.

How long have you been married? What have you learned?