Crashbox

The other day I was talking with my mother on the phone and we got into a conversation about her and my dad and, more or less, the story of their love. The passion and tenderness with which she described her thoughts and feelings for my father really blew me away... I had known growing up, of course, that they loved each other, but in youth you don't tend to give a lot of thought or weight to your parents' personal lives (for the best I am sure); but my parents' love, after 26 years still burns with an intensity I am only now coming to understand. If anyone wants proof there is such a thing as soul-mates, and that that kind of love really lasts, they just need to talk with my folks for while. It's interesting that I didn't see this for so many years---I even treated their marriage as something awful, largely because when I was in highschool they were both at a sort of mid-life state of depression---and I have to admit I am rather shocked. I am sure also that my recognition of the beauty of their love is greatly affected by my own experience and understanding of love and life. I am suddenly excited for my parents! I want to hang out with them and talk together as if they were peers; I am fascinated and deeply encouraged by their vivacity and sincerity. A lot of us here in our early twenties, especially guys I think, tend to see love and married life only from the desirous romantic side, and only from a personal standpoint. You talk with young men about marriage, and what are they thinking about? Sex, doing dishes and laundry, sex, maybe she could be a companion of sorts, sex, sex, oh yeah, children; sex... There is so often little regard understanding for the other as a person. The idea that marriage is mostly about being trapped and burdened, and you have to have your 'guys', to escape to when you can't deal with the 'girls'. Okay, so there is a scrap of truth in that, but what about the respect, the admiration, the deep friendship that should grow out of honest love for a spouse? Listening to my mother speak about my dad, there was no hint of 'I just can't understand him', or 'he's such a typical man'; no, when she spoke of him, her voice almost cracking with tenderness, she described her very best friend, her confidant, her hero, her lover, her closest, dearest friend... and that is truly lovely.
I am reading Fathers and Sons, a Russian novel highly recommended by a good friend, and I ran across a very simple but beautiful paragraph:

'Vassily Ivanovitch took his hands from his face and clasped his wife, his friend, as firmly as he had never clasped her in youth; she comforted him in his grief.'