Ordinary love: Finding shape

For a long time, I thought I understood what presence looked like in a relationship.

It looked like conversation, attention and engagement you could point to.

If something was real, you could see it. Or so I thought.

I have been married for nearly 30 years. Which is long enough to realise that you can live alongside someone for decades and still be slightly… misreading them. Not in a dramatic way. Nothing is broken or in crisis.

Just small, consistent misunderstandings that quietly shape how you see each other.

This week, I’ve been on a two-day leadership retreat at Windsor. The kind of space that quietly asks you better questions than you’re used to answering. Questions about who you are, underneath it all.

Somewhere in the middle of those conversations, I found myself thinking about my husband. He is a quiet man. He always has been. He does not fill space for the sake of it. He does not narrate his thoughts. He does not instinctively reach for words as a way of connecting.

For a long time, I took that personally. Not consciously.But persistently. I would sit beside him and feel the absence of something I thought should be there. Conversation. Energy. Engagement I could recognise.

And I would translate his quietness into a story. He’s distracted. He’s not interested. He’s not fully here.

The problem, I am beginning to understand, was not his behaviour. It was my interpretation of it. We all carry a private definition of what love looks like. Mine was visible. Long conversations, shared reflections, a sense of being met in real time.

His, I now see, was different. Presence without performance. Comfort without commentary. A steadiness that did not need to announce itself.

Neither of us was wrong. We were simply fluent in different languages.

For years, I tried, quietly, persistently, to bring him closer to mine. Not through demands. But through expectation. Through a subtle sense that “good” looked a certain way. That strong relationships were expressive, outward, more like... me.

It has taken me a long time to see this clearly. Perhaps this is what midlife does. Or perhaps it's what happens when you pause long enough to notice the patterns you're been living inside.

What I am starting to understand is that the tension in a relatinoship is not always in what is happening. Rather it is felt in the meaning we assign to it.

His quietness was never the problem. My need for it to mean something else was. There is a particular kind of relief in realising that nothing is missing. That the thing you thought you were waiting for has, in fact, been there all along. Just not in the form you expected.

As I sit with this relationship, I’ve noticed something shift. I can allow silence to sit and not to read it as absence. Perhaps it can simply be ease.

We can sit together now not always speaking, not always mirroring each other and there is less questioning underneath it. Less of a need for translation. Less quiet judgement about what this moment should look like.

It turns out love does not always look like engagement. Sometimes it looks like allowing someone to be exactly who they are… and realising that this, in itself, is a form of closeness.

He is my person. Not because he meets me in every way I once imagined. But because, somewhere along the way (and perhaps more clearly this week than ever) I am learning to see him as he actually is.

And in letting him be fully himself, I may finally be learning how to be fully myself too.

What parts of love have you been overlooking because they didn’t arrive in the form you were waiting for?