You have to like your wife. Love is an overrated, overused, term to describe a spectrum of emotions that are entirely subjective. Love is a series of dips and spikes, but like is a solid line. Like is the line that insures the dips and spikes - the safety net above the divorce pit. In marriage, nothing is more important than like. Like is what gets us through early mornings, boring car rides, packing, unpacking, drool on the pillow, nosepicking, unemployment, bad meals, church, weight gain, hair loss and all the damn chores of domesticated living. Love is the thing makes you feel dead inside when she’s away, like is when a quick check-in phone call is enough. Love can be debilitating and enraging. Like is confident and at ease. Like keeps you faithful. Like does not envy. Like is patient. Like is kind.

They say people generally fall out of love by Year 3 - sounds about right, but I like my wife more than I ever have. I like who she is and I like who she’s trying to be and I like the life we’ve built. It’s the like that’ll hold us up over the next hundred years (hopefully). One of the biggest myths of marriage is that there is only one person we can ‘truly’ love. That’s bullshit. People change. People can fall in and out of love with any number of strangers or friends given the right circumstances. But think about how many people you really like. A good litmus test for this is to scroll the list of people you’d invite on a month-long roadtrip through Montana; practically spending every waking hour together fiddling over what music to play, where to eat, when to wake up, what to see, how fast to drive. It doesn’t mean you should marry everyone on that list, but if your spouse is only on that list, you’ve got problems.

I suppose the bottom line is: most people are pretty goddamn annoying. And no matter how much you may be in love with someone, there will always be things about them that make you wanna claw your eyes out with a tuning fork. But there’s a weird alchemy that happens with the people we like, wherein, our mountains of flaws and neuroses somehow fall oddly, but contentedly, aligned with the other’s. You’re lucky to find a half-dozen of these people in a lifetime and even more blessed to know a physically attractive one that you wouldn’t mind taking orders from. You gotta like it like that.

Happy a-little-less-than-3-months-before-our-3-year-anniversary, wifelady.