Nowadays, people perceive relationships as a mentally-exhausting experience. With all the jealousy, arguments, lame fights and break-ups, love is now considered an attempt to lose one’s independence and freedom. While this might be true to some extent, since you consent to sharing your life with someone else, it does not have to be tiring. Actually, when things go right, love truly enriches your life.
Here are some select posts shared by Humans of New York featuring couples who understand what it means to love. While they share their times of pain, suffering, sacrifice and commitment to one another, their stories prove that when choosing the right person, love can truly last.
“What’s your favorite thing about your wife?”
“She’s sexy.”
“What’s your favorite thing about him?”
“He does the supermarket shopping.”
“I’ve been going through chemo for six months now. Sometimes I’ll come home from the hospital and I won’t even want to look in the mirror. I feel disfigured. I’ll have drains attached to me that he has to help measure and adjust. We’ve been together for a long time. When something like this happens, you find out what you’ve been working for all those years.”
“He knows how to treat the woman right.”
“After the kids left the house, I decided to go to medical school and become a doctor. I was 48 at the time, and had been out of school for a long time. When I asked him if he thought it was a good idea, he said: ‘Sure. It’s your turn.’”
“How’d you meet?”
“He was representing my best friend’s ex-husband in a trial, and I marched into his office to inform him that his client was a lying scumbag.”
“And so what were you thinking while she was yelling at you?”
“‘That’s a good looking woman.’”
“We met three years ago in Grand Central Station. I got stuck working late so I missed my train and was in a terrible mood. I went to get some food at the bar, and the only stool open was next to him. I asked if anyone was sitting there, and he told me ‘no,’ and helped me take off my coat. A few minutes later, his son came back from a cigarette break, and I was in his seat. All of us spent the next two hours talking. When I left, his son chased me down, handed me his business card, and said: ‘I think my dad really likes you. If you think you might like him too, please send me an email.’”
“He’s always supported a sense of independence in me.”
“How has he done that?”
“By letting me do what I damn well please.”
“We depend on each other more than we used to.”
“I didn’t know a thing about contemporary art before I met her.”
“We’ve run marathons together on all seven continents.”
“You ran a marathon in Antarctica?”
“Ran it? She won it!”
“We were laying in bed just the other night, looking at the ceiling, and I said: ‘You know, it’s been thirty years, and it’s never felt worn. There’s never been a sense of tiredness with you.’”
“We talked about it four or five times, and our families certainly pushed for it, but we decided early on that we didn’t want to have kids. There was too much we wanted to do. Since then we’ve formed our own company, made over 40 films together, worked in 60 different countries, and written 18 books— eleven of them cookbooks, some of them bestsellers.”
“Shortly after we were married, I got tuberculosis and rashes broke out all over my body. They smelled so bad that I had to be cleaned three times a day. She always made me fresh food and made sure I had clean clothes every time I bathed. One morning, during this time, she asked me: ‘Would you do the same if I got sick?’ I promised her: ‘I’ll do even more.’ She died a few years ago from a brain tumor. She was in bed for the last three years of her life. Toward the end, she couldn’t identify people. Water from her brain would drain from her eyes. I ran home from the shop three times a day to help her go to the bathroom. I was always sure to turn her. She never had a single bedsore. In the end, the doctor told me: ‘It would not have been possible to take better care of her.’”
(Karachi, Pakistan)
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