Amy Lu's View

How did Chad and I celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary? Unfortunately, we belatedly discovered that is the musical intstrument anniversary (although we’ve probably been celebrating that for years). But we did present a church service exploring love as a choice.

“People come to me with questions a lot at work because I’m kind of known as the expert on marriage at the office.”

I think I did a double-take when Chad said those words to me almost 20 years ago. At the time we had been married about 5 years, and while I thought we had a pretty good marriage, I couldn’t really imagine that many people coming to a rather introverted and traditionally masculine thirty year old guy for touchy-feely relationship advice.

As Chad continued talking about his work as a lawyer, I quickly realized he meant he was considered an expert on the legal aspects of marriage, and divorce. This made much more sense to me.

Decades later, on the eve of our 24th anniversary, I told that story at the Nora Unitarian Universalist Church as the opening of the Sunday service Chad and I presented. We were there not as self proclaimed marriage–or divorce–experts, but simply as fellow Unitarian Universalists who have done a lot of reading, listening, watching, performing, thinking, speaking and writing about love. So we shared some of those pieces of art, literature, and pop culture, with our fellow Unitarian Universalists.

We also shared some of the unique perspective Chad has gained through his work as a family law attorney and his observations of relationships as they evolve and end. Chad has also had the joy of officiating at several marriages (thanks to my groundbreaking skills with the internet and a credit card that I wielded to sign him up as an officiant with the Church of Universal Light) so our service included a piece he wrote for our friends’ Megan and Allan as their marriage was just beginning. 

We think romantic love is an interesting topic to explore, but we didn’t want to limit our service  to love between or for other people in just the romantic sense. We also don’t want to think about just the feelings or experiences of love but what it might mean to consider love a choice. 

I have a tatto–temporary, not real–on my forearm that says “Choose love now.” I first wore a “Choose love now” tattoo back in October of 2017, when Chad and I were acting in a play called “Panache.” So I recycled material from a post about that, “Panache is Scrumptious.”

“Choose love now” was the perfect motto for the mismatched lovers we played in that romantic comedy. Both of our characters learned they needed to stop living in the past, trapped by loss and grief, to take a chance on a new romance.

But choosing love can be about much more than a romantic relationship. Many of us are experiencing, or will experience, times when we aren’t romantically in love or loved by or love adjacent to another person, but that doesn’t mean love isn’t for us. We can “Choose love now” by being willing to take a risk and live a life of passion, dedication, and openness, possibly including but more expansive than romantic love. Choose to love life, and what you are, and who you want to be. Choose to love it today in all its imperfections.

As we were trying not to just focus on the fact that it was our anniversary, we did NOT read one of our favorite reflections on long-term relationships. But since this is my blog, I can include this from “The Sparrow” by Mary Doria Russell:

“Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.” She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, “They’ve all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and – well, the rest is none of your business.”

“But people change,” he said quietly.

“Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we’ve had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people.”

And Chad and I have kept on choosing that it makes sense for the new people we are constantly becoming to create a new marriage. We don’t go for the idea that “We were made for each other,” (way too much like destiny/fate for my taste) but we believe we have chosen to continuously make ourselves for each other.

There is a completely different blog post in that idea, but some of the top ways we’ve chosen to change together include running, brussell sprouts, bourbon, and Unitarian Universalism.

We ended the service with the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, which we learned from the play “The Metamorphoses” which we recently saw the Guthrie. Baucis and Philemon are a virtuous couple who are turned into trees