Stella has turned into a dedicated Taylor Swift fan, which means I've been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift lately. Whenever I hear the song Lover, it strikes me as a 20-year-old's idea of what love will be like -- saving seats for each other, having your own place where you can decide for yourselves to let your friends sleep on the couch. It's interesting to me that she was almost 30 when she wrote it, and I'm curious about whether she penned those lyrics with a younger audience in mind.
Occasionally I have idle thoughts about what a middle-aged version of the song might sound like. Will you file the taxes? mow the lawn when it's not your turn? be patient when your spouse does the thing that has irritated you for 35 years now? (Maybe, just possibly, that version is less likely to be streamed by the teens and 20-somethings.) This evening I am thinking about another addition to the middle-aged lady version, sparked by a green salad.
I don't eat a lot of green salad. There's usually some on the dinner table, but Elwood eats more than 90% of it. I prefer salads in the slaw family-- I like them more cabbage-y and less lettuce-y -- so it's not unusual for us to have his-and-hers salads at dinnertime. But tonight I asked him to pass me the green salad, and I found out something that makes me feel unexpectedly loved: he always cuts the cherry tomatoes in half.
I don't think I have a lot of texture issues when it comes to food. My mother has a long list of foods she can't deal with because of the way they feel to her, but I like a variety of textures, usually. I do not, however, like it when cherry tomatoes pop inside my mouth. If I get a salad at a restaurant I have to eat the cherry tomatoes first, when I'm really hungry. Once I slow down a little, I'll look at the whole cherry tomatoes, imagine them bursting inside my mouth, and push them aside, uneaten.
When he first learned this about me, Elwood thought it was strange and fussy. And who knows, maybe he still thinks it's strange and fussy. But here's what I learned tonight: if he's making a green salad with cherry tomatoes, he always takes the time to cut them in half. There's more than a 90% chance that I won't eat the salad, but he cuts them in half anyway.
So where Taylor sings "Can we always be this CLOSE?" I'm swapping in "Will you halve my to-may-TOES?" Because that's what long-lasting love looks like, I think: you don't always understand why they are the way they are, but you make space for them to be that way anyhow.
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