Twenty-four years ago, I thought love was the cathedral.
The wedding. The vows. The dress. The flowers. The pictures we would frame and put on shelves. The people gathered around us while we promised things to each other that, if I’m being fair to our twenty-something selves, we could not possibly have understood yet.
We meant them.
We just didn’t know what they would eventually be asked to hold.
Back then, love felt like a spark. Butterflies. Chemistry. Long conversations. That electric little thrill of realizing someone had chosen you and you had chosen them right back.
There is something beautiful about that kind of love.
There still is.
But twenty-four years later, I think love feels less like the cathedral and more like the infrastructure holding it up.
And I mean that in the most romantic way possible.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about flying buttresses.
Which is perhaps what happens when you’ve been married long enough that your idea of romance starts incorporating medieval architecture.
Stay with me.
Flying buttresses are those sweeping exterior supports you see on old cathedrals. They carry the outward pressure of the building away from the walls and transfer it somewhere strong enough to bear it.
They exist because walls can only carry so much weight on their own.
But here’s the beautiful part:
The buttresses didn’t make the cathedrals smaller.
They allowed them to become bigger.
Taller.
More expansive.
They made room for enormous windows, soaring ceilings, stained glass, and light.
The support wasn’t evidence that the cathedral was weak.
The support was part of what made the cathedral possible.
That feels incredibly romantic to me.
When we were young, I think I believed strong love meant being strong together.
Now I think strong love means knowing where to stand when the other person needs somewhere to lean.
There have been years when I have leaned harder.
There have been years when John has.
And there have been seasons when I’m pretty sure we were both leaning heavily against the same questionable support beam, looking at each other like, “This is fine.”
Marriage: Somehow both a sacred covenant and a group project.
Twenty-four years have taught us the architecture of each other.
We know where the other person is strong and where they are tender. We know when “I’m fine” means fine and when it absolutely does not. We know when to ask questions, when to sit quietly, and, after considerable trial and error, when absolutely nobody asked for our advice.
We still get it wrong.
Of course we do.
Twenty-four years of marriage does not make you an expert on marriage. It makes you an expert on approximately one very specific marriage.
Ours.
And one thing ours has taught me is that partnership was never fifty-fifty.
Some weeks he carries more. Some weeks I do. Sometimes one of us is operating at full capacity while the other is held together with an energy drink and a prayer.
We don’t track percentages anymore.
We track sustainability.
Can we both still stand?
Is the structure holding?
When one of us is carrying too much, the other shifts.
That’s the flying buttress.
It doesn’t make the pressure disappear.
It says, “You do not have to absorb all of this alone.”
I didn’t know twenty-four years ago how romantic that would become.
I didn’t know “I took care of it” could someday rival poetry.
I didn’t know relief could feel like intimacy.
I didn’t know maintenance could feel sacred.
But loving someone for a long time doesn’t mean preventing every hard thing from reaching them. Sometimes you can’t.
Sometimes life is heavy because life is heavy.
Sometimes there is no clever solution. No inspirational quote. No three-step plan. No amount of optimism capable of changing the fact that something simply hurts.
You cannot fix everything for the person you love.
But you can stand nearby.
You can help carry what can be carried.
You can become somewhere safe for the weight to go.
And maybe that support isn’t only about keeping something from collapsing.
Maybe it’s about making room for it to grow.
Twenty-four years ago, I thought we were promising to love the people standing in front of each other.
I understand that promise differently now.
We were promising to keep meeting the people we would become.
Neither of us stayed the same.
Thank God for that, too.
Because I don’t want to be loved only as the girl I was twenty-four years ago.
I want to be loved here.
Now.
After everything life has added and removed.
After becoming a mother.
After changing careers.
After changing my mind.
After the things that softened me and the things that made me stronger.
After losing pieces of who I thought I was and finding new ones.
After becoming someone the girl in the wedding dress would recognize in some ways and be completely surprised by in others.
And I want that for John, too.
I don’t want him trapped by some old version of himself simply because that was the version who stood beside me and made the promise.
Love shouldn’t require us to remain frozen so we can remain recognizable.
Maybe the deeper promise is:
Keep becoming.
I’ll keep looking for you.
That may be one of the great privileges of a long marriage.
Someone remembers your previous editions.
John remembers versions of me I can barely access anymore.
I remember versions of him our children have never met.
We remember each other before certain jobs, certain losses, certain successes, certain disappointments, certain wrinkles, certain lessons.
Before we knew what we know now.
And somehow, through all those versions, we have kept introducing ourselves to each other.
Not:
This is who you were when I married you, so this is who I need you to remain.
But:
Oh.
This is who you are becoming.
Let me learn you here, too.
That is its own kind of intimacy.
But marriage isn’t one long architectural stress test.
Thank God.
There is so much joy here, too.
There are ordinary Tuesdays.
Inside jokes.
Hand squeezes.
Conversations consisting almost entirely of facial expressions.
References that have accumulated so many layers over twenty-four years that explaining one to an outsider would require a PowerPoint presentation, supporting documentation, and possibly sworn testimony.
We have our own language now.
We know exactly what will make the other person laugh at an inappropriate moment.
We can communicate with one eyebrow from across a room.
We know which stories the other person is about to tell before they start telling them.
We know when to make eye contact and when making eye contact would be a catastrophic mistake because neither of us will recover.
We are still weird together.
Thank God.
That is romance, too.
So after twenty-four years, I find myself strangely grateful for the unphotographed architecture of us.
For every time he has stood where I needed somewhere to lean.
For every time I have done the same.
For the ordinary maintenance.
For the repairs.
For the reinforcement.
For the room we have given each other to change.
Twenty-four years ago, I thought love was the cathedral.
And I still love the cathedral.
I love the wedding pictures. I love the vows. I love those two young people standing there, sincerely promising forever without having the slightest idea what forever would actually require of them.
But now I know something the girl in the wedding dress didn’t know yet.
The cathedral gets to be beautiful because something is willing to bear the weight.
And the support doesn’t diminish the beauty.
It makes more of it possible.
Happy 24th anniversary, John.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
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