She loves me

She loves me! She loves me!

This is probably the singles biggest miracle of my life. Well, maybe it's a really close second to the fact that I'm still alive, against some pretty stiff odds. Escept that I have her to thank for the last seven years of that. When continuing to live is a daily (sometimes hourly) decision, the fact that she loves me is a powerful incentive.

I'll try to explain what I'm talking about, but it's hard to understand if you never had it. I know, because until I met her, until I loved her, I never really understood or believed in it myself.

Let's start with a term that everyone thinks they know:

~Soulmate~

The ideal of the soulmate is the perfect partner, the perfect match. All the fairy tales we grew up on tell us that each of has one...somewhere. Most of us spend our lives, searching for, and failing to find, this person. We come to believe that there is no such thing.

Part of this is because the fairy tales (and their modern form, movies) only tell part of the story. For one thing, the people in the stories are always perfectly pretty. (Personally, I think one of the best things that the "Shrek" movies did was to slap that stereotype right upside the head.) The other thing follows on the first: the aspect of in which the soulmate is most often presented is that of sexual compatibility.

So it is no surprise that when people say that they've found their soulmate, what they reallly mean (consciously or not) is that they're having fabulous sex, and still ha[[y to wake up next to each other. But sooner or later, the passion kind of fades, and normal life reasserts itself. This is when find out whether you really have your soulmate.

Here's a little quiz:

1. Are you still happy to wake up next to this person even though you were both too tired to even think about sex the night before?
2. Are you still happy to have this person in your life when the checking account is overdrawn?
3. and they just polished off the milk?
4. Do you talk about things besides day-to-day operating stuff?
5. Do you tell jokes in "shorthand"?
6. Can you cry on each other's shoulder, and know it's okay if you can't explain why you're crying?
7. When you argue, do you listen more than you yell?
8. When the arguments and you still disagree, do you still love each other?

These are just examples, but you get the idea. The more of these questions you can honestly say "yes" to, the more likely it is that you really do have your soulmate. The real key to all of it is this: Do you love each other for who you really are (and for that, you both have to know who you really are, and who each other is), or for who you want them to be?

That's how you know. Do they love you as much when you fail as when you succeed? Do you love them when your assets are down to $.12, two packets of Ramen, and a cat whose litterbox needs to be changed?

When I talk about my relationship, I often talk about the challenges, and about all the things I do (or at least that I'm responsible for, even if I don't manage to do'em all). And people ask me what I get out of it.

Sometimes the answer is "just enough to keep me going". Sometimes I try to be more specific:

• we laugh a lot
• she holds me when I cry
• we talk about all kinds of things, from science and history to our dreams for the future
• she understands me in ways that no one ever has before, and loves all of me.

But the essence of it is: she loves me. It took me 40 years, but I finally found that semi-mythical creature known as "soulmate".

What do I get out of it? Everuthing. She loves me, and that's reason enough to keep on living. Our life together is often hard, but "she loves me" trumps all the troubles.

She loves me. And I'm glad and grateful and amazed by it, every day.