It is my 31st Valentine’s Day with my wife.
When I was sixteen, Valentine’s Day meant butterflies, anticipation, maybe some awkward grand gesture that felt enormous at the time. My ideas about love were sincere — but shallow in the way only youth can be shallow. Not wrong. Just incomplete.
Thirty-one years later, love feels different. Not diminished. Deeper.
Any long relationship carries its full weather system. Fair-weather love is easy. It enjoys the view, the sunsets, the gentle breeze. But storm-tested love is different. It’s not about liking the view — it’s about trusting the roof. It’s about knowing that when the wind howls and the foundation trembles, you are not facing it alone.
There have been triumphs and moments of complete devastation. Deaths. Promotions. Losing. Winning. Screwing up. Making it up. Growing up. Changing. And somehow, through all of it, growing closer together.
When I look at some marriages that have stood the test of time, I see couples who are still largely the same people they were when they married. Same careers. Same beliefs. Same town. There is something beautiful about that kind of continuity. I imagine it must feel steady and safe — like building a life on bedrock that never shifts.
Our marriage hasn’t looked like that.
We have each changed multiple times over. Careers have shifted. Foundational beliefs have evolved — sometimes dramatically. We’ve moved. We’ve shed skins. We’ve rebuilt identities. More than once.
In truth, we haven’t just been married for thirty-one years. We have been married to several different versions of each other. And somehow, each time a new version emerged, we chose again.
That doesn’t make our relationship better. It simply proves something I once didn’t know was possible: a partnership can survive growth. It can survive reinvention. It can survive becoming different people than the ones who said “I do.”
It is possible to love someone and allow them to become themselves — even when who they are becoming surprises you. Even when the growth is inconvenient. Even when it’s hard.
As adults, you don’t have to stay the same people who married as kids. In fact, giving each other the freedom to change may be the very thing that keeps love from becoming a cage. By letting go of who we were, we make room for who we are.
There is a quiet miracle in having a partner who has walked with you through the various heavens and hells of existence — and kept holding your hand. I don’t say lightly that I would not be alive without her. Certainly not as happy. Not as secure. Not as hopeful.
She hasn’t just been beside me. She has witnessed me. And in being witnessed through every version — the confident ones, the lost ones, the evolving ones — I have been shaped.
At sixteen, love was butterflies.
At forty-seven, love is reality-shaping.
It is the slow construction of a shared world. It is the discipline of staying. The courage of changing. The grace of allowing the other person to change too.
Butterflies are beautiful.
But building — and rebuilding — a universe together? That’s something else entirely.
Happy Valentine’s Day.