My husband has this god-awful habit…if anything edible falls to the ground and is picked up within 10 seconds…it’s still edible.  The 10 second rule.  I’ve tried to convince him that this is not the most pristine personal rule, but thus far he’s only partially trained.  That is to say he no longer does it in front of me…unless I'm outnumbered 4-to-1 by males with the same personal rule shared by my husband.  And that's only because I too am trained…to follow his “Don’t embarrass me in front the guys” personal rule.  On the flip side, I get 75% of the closet space in our bedroom and 100% of every other closet in the house.  Not bad.  

Yet despite the positives, it is clear that my husband and I are far from the exotic “Power Couple.”  Though I will say that, like Brangelina or TomKatt…my husband and I can fuse our names together in a sickening sort of moniker…Heaven.  (Makes you a bit ill, huh?  No worries, we rarely use it.)  Just please do not for a moment assume that Heaven is descriptive of our home life.  We’re busy.  Things get overlooked.  We both have careers.  We both have lots of friends and family members.  There is a tween-ager living with us on weekends…a male one at that.  We have seven dogs with lots of toys and sweaters.  Things get overlooked.  But even in what is sometimes verging on pure chaos, we do have a good life.  We compliment each other well.  My flaws are his strong points, and vice versa.  We’re both light-hearted people who like to meet new people.  We get one another little surprises while running errands and actually respond to text messages.  We also both have just an awfully whacked sense of humor.  We fit.   

But still again, I cannot really refer to us as a power couple.  Sure, we sometimes wear nice suits and heels (uhm, me…not him…seriously.)  And we dine out a lot.  But we are not at all intimidating and most everything of seriousness in our lives eventually becomes the target of a random joke.  It’s not that we take nothing serious…we just take nothing too seriously.  Yet when I look at our relationship I think…hey, that’s pretty powerful.  So…I’ve spent some time trying to figure out exactly why a down-to-Earth, non-Power Couple can have a truly powerful relationship.  And when I figured it out it was just this little “ohhhh” of recognition.  Duh, blondie.  How’d you not notice THAT? 

We both love.  Just openly and stupidly and fearlessly.  We love one another.  We love our friends. We love our families.  We love our neighbors.  We love to travel.  We love to stay home.  We love the people on the street.  We love the people hiding behind doors.  We go out of our way to help people, randomly, without expectation.  We love our dogs, we love YOUR dogs.  We just love to love.  But more important, I think, is that neither one of us is afraid to love.  Angry people kick and scream why you try to love them.  Timid people run away.  Resentful people take love without loving back.  But somehow, the geek-girl and the husband put aside the BS and just decided that anything worth doing…including marriage…is worth doing well. 

So this whole little blog is simply to say that at the end of the day all that ever truly matters is love.  Not one-sided, lop-sided, awkward love.  Not scared-to-love love.  Not trying-to-love love.  Just plain, everyday love.  It powers you over obstacles.  It navigates you through other people’s BS.  It is a beacon when you cannot see how to get to the other side.  Love gives you confidence.  And strength.  And focus.  It gives you not a purpose, but rather an understanding of your purpose.  The only drawback to this amazing, mystical, curious thing is that you must be willing to give it whole-heartedly.  Half-assed love is pointless.  You must love without fear of rejection or loss.  When someone does not want to give it back, you have to be willing to move forward and continue to love.  You where you can and when you can…for as long as you can.  Nothing makes a couple more powerful.