It's next to impossible to feel "in love" with someone you resent. But if you love them, it's well worth working on the resentments and on micro-moments of positivity resonance.

If it relaxes you so much that you forget to pick up your spouse at the airport, it can make a mess of things.

Alcohol also reduces our inhibitions. This is wonderful when it lets you get naked with your beloved. Or when it lets you dance in public with a life partner who loves to dance.

But when it reduces your inhibitions about using your intimate knowledge of a partner's vulnerabilities to get what you want through cruel words, it shuts off future intimacy.

And when it affects your inhibitions about hurling the TV across the room in anger at the man or woman you promised to love and cherish, it permanently harms your relationship even if the TV misses, even if the anger is warranted.

Should it lower your inhibitions about raping or hurting your partner when he or she refuses sex, you introduce terror into your relationship, terror that will return every time you initiate sex or have a drink to relax yourself.

When you take a drink again after such an event, knowing it lowers your inhibitions enough to do any of these things to someone you love, you automatically qualify as an alcoholic, an alcohol addict. It is irrelevant what you drink or how much you drink. This awful disease has its grip on you.

Alcoholism is called a disease because it follows a predictable path of harming your body and your relationships. For most people, the only way to stop it is to stop drinking and build a support system to get you through all the good and bad situations that trigger your taking a drink.

If you want to enjoy being married, please seek help as soon as you cross this line of unhealthy lowered inhibitions. No apology, no explanation, no excuse will fix your marriage or protect your wellbeing until you do. Please see a doctor, see a counselor, join AA, or do all three right away.

If you are married to someone who has crossed this line, please understand that you cannot make this decision for them, and their inhibitions are not coming back until they make it. You must protect yourself to protect the relationship and your spouse from this disease. Don't take on the role of therapist. Don't take on the role of reputation-protector or secret-keeper. Take on the role of body guard and get yourself to safety. Whether or not you forgive your mate. Al-Anon offers help from others who have been through this.

The income from their small start-up business has taken a dip recently. They are blowing through savings faster than they would like, and things get rather tense at times for them, as they do for many of us.

Another great 'assume love' story....for mother's day my husband bought me a couple of big fluffy blue towels...I was pretty embarrassed opening them in front of my folks...and kinda quietly 'fuming' on the way home.

But then I thought of the 'assume love patty magic', and in my sweetest voice I said, "Honey, that was so sweet of you to get me those nice towels..."

He reaches over and says, "I want you to have the very best. I'm really trying to provide great things for you."

Sigh.

What can I say, thanks again!

There is a very good chance your spouse also tries hard to show you how much you are loved--even when you accidentally interpret this as embarrassing. You can assume your amygdala knows best, or you can assume love and do a double-check before you ruin a great gift.

Praise makes us brave.

Want to nudge your partner to tackle a big project or make a challenging change? Praise gives a much bigger nudge than criticism does.

Oh, how I have to remind myself of this, often in mid-criticism. I give myself a pat on the back for remembering and changing course.

Want your partner to praise you more and criticize you less? Ask for it. Avoid implying your mate ought to fix a deficiency. Instead, praise some of the other ways he or she has met your needs and lifted you up. People who don't normally praise probably don't feel comfortable dishing it out. It will take a stretch for your mate. But praise makes us brave.

My favorite definition of art has always been Tolstoy's: art is infection.

I am utterly infected by this book. I'm reading it, I can't breathe, I feel sick, I can't stop reading.

So I bought Wave as my birthday gift to myself and read it in gulps, stopping only to breathe again. The blurb for this memoir begins:

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived.

That pretty much sums up the opening chapter, if you can somehow imagine what it is like to be packing for your return to your job as an economics professor in London, saying goodbye to your friend from California who has also been visiting family in Sri Lanka and enjoying a farewell stay at the beach when you must suddenly run for your lives with no time even to bang on your parents' hotel room door.

I won't spoil the rest of that breathless and awful chapter, but it is the rest that may well inform your marriage, as well as your relationship with your kids and your parents. It takes place in Colombo, London, and New York over seven years of Sonali putting the pieces back together. And it is, indeed, infectious, an awful and uplifting and oh so difficult journey through what she can bear to remember of life before that awful day.

I laughed with self-recognition at what she said to her dead husband about haunting the Dutch couple. I think you may, too. Her take on the report cover her father-in-law found is a definite Assume Love moment.

This is a memoir. It is not intended to help your marriage in any way. And yet, every new perspective does help. And this one is infectious. It is not just something to thing about; it affects every part of you. So I am adding it to my recommended reading for anyone in a life partnership or marriage or choosing a partner for one.

Let me know if you read it, too. I love comments.

Depressed fathers tend to withdraw. If they are depressed when their kids are this age, the kids have a harder time developing this life-easing character strength, UNLESS...

Their dad has a high level of emotional intimacy with his wife.

So, dad, please Assume Love, Expect Love, and Find Third Alternatives now.

More on this study by Jennifer M. Engle and Nancy L. McElwain via press release and the journal Developmental Psychology.

Do you feel deprived of romance?

Are you sure your mate has no respect for who you are and what you do?

Is this a second marriage where your mate just cannot get along with your teen?

Do you long for the sort of sex life others seem to enjoy?

Are you now the sole breadwinner through no choice of your own?

Do all the chores seem to belong to you, even though both of you work?

Are you reeling from discovering your mate had an affair?

Or are you just tired of being yelled at or argued with?

A little thought experiment for you: imagine your mate's doctor just informed the two of you that your spouse or life partner has contracted an awful new infection. There is no cure yet, but you are in little to no danger of catching it.

Of those who have contracted this infection, eight out of every ten have died within a week and needed hospitalization for their last 24 to 48 hours. The other two out of ten have recovered. So far, there is no way to predict who is likely to make it.

Sit with this for a bit. How would you spend the next week? Will you stay and care for your spouse? Take time off from work? Let any other responsibilities slide? Do anything special together?

Your needs won't change. What will you do during this week about the one that has been bothering you so much?

If your mate dies, what will become of this problem? Will it go away? Get easier to deal with? Or get worse?

Not knowing what the outcome of the infection will be, will you expect your partner to do anything for you while it is still possible? Or will you forget your own needs to meet his or hers? If he or she survives, will you expect a payback for this week? Or does it seem like giving will be its own reward?

Which outcome do you hope for? Do you look forward to getting out of your marriage so easily and with all the assets instead of divorcing? Or are you hoping to be one of the 20% of couples who go on dealing with their problems?

Someone is knocking loudly and urgently on the door to the doctor's office. Are you two holding hands? In each other's arms? Sitting apart, stunned? The man at the door pulls the doctor out into the hall.

Someone mixed up the blood work. Your mate is fine. Someone else is going to go through all this, not you two. You may resume your marriage.

Or you just might want to make a few changes in it, if you are just a bit clearer now about what really matters to you.

Adesh offers a very popular viewpoint these days:

Marry to be happy, divorce to be happy.

You should be happy no matter what.

Being happy gives you all the strength to look after your child well.

The problem is, he's wrong. The statistics show yours odds of being happy and strong are actually better sticking with the marriage.

But not if the marriage is like the one Carolyn describes: abuse, depression, stress-induced illness, everyone walking on eggshells, kids harming themselves to relieve the anxiety.

Scot opens his comment as I would:

I feel like there's a false dilemma here. In other words, I think the two choices you're presenting (break up and be miserable, or stay together and be miserable) are not the only two options.

This is, in fact, why I write this blog. Once I started believing that staying together with the man I loved (and could trust to be kind to me and our son) would make me miserable, I spent all my time gathering evidence to prove I was right and plotting my escape.

Then he died while I was at work one day, and I discovered 95% of what was making me miserable had nothing to do with him, because it was all still a problem with him gone. My misery had all been based on my expectation that he should rescue me from it, so I would not need to do the hard work of fixing it myself. Once he was dead, I did the hard work.

As I lifted each giant beam off my overburdened self, I thought about what life with him would be like with that gone, and I missed him fiercely. One of the hardest was when I threw off the commute that took up so much of my time. I found my new office so near the one where he had worked that we could have walked to lunch together on sunny days. Because of where the old one was, we argued over who would pick up the dry cleaning and prescriptions or renew the car registrations.

I had been so sure he was being the unreasonable one. Walking to lunch together! With no babysitter money. And getting home early even after running those errands myself. I denied us both all of that.

Without those arguments and resentment, I imagine the landscaping and decorating of our new home, which finally got done after he died, would have seemed a lot less of an ordeal, too.

And what if I had figured out back then that I could learn to dance even if he did not want to take lessons with me? I had no idea how many other people were looking for dance partners with no relationship strings attached. Blaming him for my inaction on that dream got in the way of all our other weekend fun.

Be happy? It's pretty much an inside job, unless you live in an environment where you fear being beaten or killed. It's something you must do for yourself. Ending your relationship with the person you expected would do it for you won't make it any easier.

Curiosity is one of the 24 character strengths studied in the Values in Action (VIA) study. This means a large panel of psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other researchers found it to be valued across most cultures throughout recorded history around the globe.

It's a good thing. We honor explorers. We praise those who invented the things we now cannot live without and the scientists who discovered things we're so glad to know. We may take a while to come around, but we know it is the curious among our artists that keep the arts moving forward.

But curiosity competes with other current American values, like our cherished right to privacy. Many of us hear "keep your nose out of other people's business" throughout our childhoods. It competes with being a team player. Teams stick to what works for the team and don't go "looking for trouble." It also competes with our concern for our children's safety, so we tell them "curiosity killed the cat." Not just an animal with one life like us, but one with nine lives!

So, depending on the balance of messages in your mate's childhood, you may be married to someone with little curiosity, either in general or for other people's business. I am. And that's fine, unless you grew up in a home where interest in what you've been up to or what you're feeling was a way of showing love.

Falling in love seems to make everyone curious about the new person in their lives. But for those who are not very curious or who have been repeatedly chastised for their curiosity, it can fade pretty quickly. You may not miss it until something else makes you fear love is fading. Before you buy your own story about your spouse's feelings, do a quick check for other evidence of general or people-specific curiosity.

If you are married to someone who is not very curious, then not asking about your day, even when you had something big expected today, is not evidence anything's wrong with your marriage or your spouse.

When you have an interesting story you're dying to tell, try an upbeat "ask me about my day" or "ask me how I feel about this" instead of waiting in agony to be asked. Because it's quite likely you are still loved, just by someone who approaches loves a bit differently than you do.

How about you? How curious are you about your spouse's day? Do you wish your husband or wife was more curious about yours?

John Gottman - He's a well-regarded psychologist who researches what's different about marriages that survive and marriages that end in divorce. Two big takeaways.

First, the ratio of positive to negative interactions between spouses is 5:1 or greater in successful marriages. Interactions include our words, our body language, and our facial expressions. Fighting, teasing, and defending your boundaries are indeed OK in a marriage, but only when outweighed by smiles, kind words, gentle touches, enthusiastic agreement, kisses, hugs, and other good stuff.

Second, there are four horsemen of divorce. If they ride into town, get help right away. They are Criticism (of your mate's character or personality), Contempt (insults, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mocking), Defensiveness (acting like a victim, justified in your critical or contemptuous response to what you don't like), and Stonewalling (stony silence, icy distance, the silent treatment, changing the subject).

Shelly Gable - She's a well-regarded positive psychologist whose research shows it matters more what we do when a spouse is capitalizing (sharing good news) than looking for sympathy.

There are four possible capitalization responses: active-constructive, passive-constructive, active-destructive, and passive-destructive. Active-constructive responses lead to strong marriages.

The constructive part means you focus in your initial response on the upside of the good news and ignore any possible downside. Sure, winning the lottery may bring moochers out of the woodwork and getting on the bestseller list could make it harder to eat out anonymously, and getting a promotion might require more overtime, but now is not the time for that discussion. It is also not the time for discussing when you will get fed or what a bad day you had or some good news of yours from your childhood.

The active part means you give it more than a passing, "That's great." You join in telling the story of this good news. You recall the hard work that led to it or label it a well-deserved turn of events. You ask questions about how your spouse wants to celebrate or what good things will come from this.

Harriet Lerner - She's not a researcher, but her analogy in The Dance of Anger thirty-some years ago struck a chord with so many of us for so long that it's well worth paying attention to.

Your initial attempts at a change in your marriage are likely to be met the same as a new step in a dance. Without even being aware of it, your spouse may try to lead you back to the familiar and expected steps, and more than once. Give a strong signal that you will be trying a new step and keep trying until it feels comfortable to your spouse, even if it means being led back to the old one a few times.

Gary Chapman - He's a preacher who observed that we don't all regard the same things as signs of love. This leads us to misinterpret our spouse's actions or to get poor reactions to our best attempts at being loving.

He named Five Love Languages that seem to cover most of our misunderstandings, and millions of us have shared them and his books about them with others. The languages are Receiving Gifts, Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Acts of Service, and Quality Time. If your spouse speaks a different one from you, it's time to learn more about it.

Emerson Eggerichs - He's another preacher, and I must admit I did not buy his advice at first. He backed it up not with research but with Bible verses I thought were taken out of context. And then I heard him speak. In a room of 2,000 marriage educators, half men and half women, all well-trained in what makes marriage work and what does not.

The 1,000 men in that room were my research sample. Hearing their response to his questions opened my eyes. Since then, I have seen brain research backing it up. To men (unless you mess with their testosterone and estrogen levels), feeling loved means feeling respected, not cherished. And just as women who stop feeling cherished often lose respect for their men, men who stop feeling respected lose every romantic impulse. Eggerichs calls this stepping on each other's air hoses, because we behave frantically when we feel we have lost the love we need to live.

The takeaway: If you feel you are losing your wife's respect, cherish her anyway. And if you feel you are no longer cherished by your husband, give him your respect anyway. Because your partner goes into panicky survival mode when you don't.

Gottman's Four Horsemen (Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling) convince us we are no longer respected or cherished, even when Chapman's Words, Gifts, Acts of Service, Physical Touch, and Quality Time try to say otherwise. Gable's Active-Constructive responses show respect and speak the Love Languages of both Quality Time and Words of Affirmation. Defensiveness (one of the Four Horsemen) is all about trying to lead the Dance of Anger back to the old, familiar steps. And I don't know about you, but I get such a thrill from dancing with anyone whose body language feedback is positive five times as often as it says I goofed up that I will try my best to follow any change in the steps.

Today would have been my 40th wedding anniversary if my first husband had lived -- and if I had not foolishly believed divorce was the only alternative to the resentments in our marriage. I am so thrilled that you had the good sense to look for alternatives and glad you found this blog. May all your anniversaries be filled with awe at how well you two function together and how thoroughly you are known, accepted, respected, and cherished by your spouse.

Remember to Expect Love from your partner in marriage. In other words, don't expect other things and thereby overlook the love you long for.

For example, some folks profess their love with words like "I cannot live without you." And they mean it. Or they believe they do: death by broken heart is actually rather rare. But the important thing to remember here is that these are the words of someone who loves with words. The generous person who loves with gifts or the helpful person who loves by helping won't feel loving saying such a thing, even if they feel they need you.

And they will stop doing their thing if it isn't working because you are waiting for these words.

So, maybe you don't want such over-the-top words. What you want is a little gratitude for all you do. This expectation is still a bit of premeditated resentment if gratitude is difficult for your spouse or if you two are locked in a competition to be the more helpful one. For you to feel needed, your spouse must feel needy, no? Maybe what he or she most needs is some relief from that feeling.

Maybe by now you're yelling at me through your computer or smart phone. You don't need the words. You don't need a fancy thank you. What you need is some sign you are needed, some hint you are not disposable, some guarantee you are doing enough to prevent your husband or wife from walking out the door, some inkling that all the effort you are putting in will not be for naught.

And I feel for you. I've been there. It's scary. It's awful. It's vulnerable.

And the only way out is to come, ever so slowly, to the realization that it is an impossible wish that is eating you alive.

No matter how great a husband or wife you are, there is no way to be good enough to guarantee your love will never be rejected. No way.

You must learn to love without this guarantee.

You are needed. Your money, your decorating savvy, your bug squashing, your laundry washing, your incredible sex moves may be needed. But the one thing you can be certain your spouse needs from you is your love.

And you cannot truly love while you are telling yourself you are not needed just because your mate has not announced you are.

Welcome to vulnerable, the place where the best marriages happen.

Last night, the President addressed a news conference called after his wife announced she and their child had moved out of the White House because he is having an affair. He opened with this: "My marriage is none of your damn business!"

For all the crazy plots these folks have laid on us, this is the first line to get an audible scoff from me.

Because it is. And not just a President's marriage. Every marriage. Marriage is about our relationship to our community, our religious fellowship, our state, and our nation and not just our relationship with each other.

We The People would not give the First Date a platform for world-changing actions nor a budget. These go only to a spouse.

We won't let your cohabiting partner continue receiving your Social Security checks after you die. They go back into the pot for others. We won't cut you a break on the choice between risking perjury and risking loss of shared income if you move in with a criminal, but we will if you publicly marry that same criminal.

In most states, our courts will not help you lay claim to assets from the job your lover works while you care for the house and kids. But if you marry, we will. And we'll toss in a special income tax break for the year your spouse dies. And let you spread your shared income over the two of you in determining which tax bracket you fall in.

Why? Because, for one, marrying significantly reduces the odds your offspring will become a burden on the rest of us. It reduces how much you two will cost Medicare in your old age. It increases the odds you will have income to pay taxes on if you become disabled. And it decreases the chance you will spread or need financial help for treating a sexually transmitted disease. We benefit, so you two benefit.

Married men are statistically more likely to show up for work and perform their jobs well, too. This gives married men a better shot at landing a job than unmarried men.

But there is a downside for the rest of us. When we offer you benefits for marrying, we encourage secrecy when you violate your vows. If you rule a nation, guard our secrets, protect us, or work for any of us, your desire for secrecy could easily compromise our interests.

And this is why your marriage is very much our business, Mr. Made-for-TV President. If you want a more private life, turn down the package of benefits we offer for marrying before you break those vows.

• Firing


• Severe depression


• Blindness


• A home so small your visiting father can only get to the bathroom through your bedroom or by going outside


• Bulimia


• Painkiller addiction


• A rehab program you cannot leave that's so bad your counselor commits suicide


• A bad hiking fall with a serious head injury for the one spouse who can drive


• Wanting to move back to a more familiar place to escape a bad job when you cannot find jobs for both of you there


• The slow death of a widowed mother

If you have ever wondered, "How will I/we survive this?" — read this book. If you have ever thought divorce or suicide was the only way out of your current pain, read this book. If you are married to someone life seems to challenge at every turn, read this book, and pay attention to Jim's part of the story.

You need to know what remarkable things await someone who rides the waves that might have knocked them down. You need to feel, through Sue's story and the masterful way she writes about it, the other side of each wave, where anguish turns to exuberance and grief turns to peace.

If you bail while it's bad, you will never know the upside of crisis. And if you don't get this book, you will miss one great read.

Out of the Whirlpool: A Memoir of Remorse and Reconciliation, by Sue Wiygul Martin.

The book comes out in May 2013, so right now, let Sue know you want the announcement. While you're there, you can read early drafts of some of the chapters for free.

I am supposed to reveal when I receive anything from anyone whose work I tout. I received an autographed copy of the advance reader's copy of this book, with no requirement to do anything more than offer my feedback to Sue.

I received something much more valuable from her that I am not required to reveal. I met Sue while working for the US Department of Veterans Affairs on website and elearning accessibility. We met in person several times at meetings and conferences.

Sue possesses a presence, a fire in her belly that lets her move from outrage to laughter almost as fast an an infant does and to tender concern or all business as fast as that infant's mother. It's affecting. It's contagious. It's life-affirming. And she will tell you flat out that it and her blindness come from the time she took a rifle to her head to try to end a very unhappy time in her life.

So what does this have to do with marriage? Divorce is nowhere near as final as suicide, but it ends a family and a relationship. It keeps you from ever getting to the other side of the wave if there is one. Before you pull that trigger, you owe it to yourself to read Sue's story and try to catch a spark from that fire in her belly.

1. How do you get a partner (or a friend) who is resistant, to express THEIR goals, and
2. How do you get a partner who is threatened by your new enthusiasm to support YOUR goals?

The answer to the first one is simple. You don't.

You may hope to support a partner's goal in pursuit of more support for your own. This does not often work very well.

• Not everyone has goals.


• Some who have goals have process goals, like staying in the moment or maximizing flow or gratitude each day, rather than outcome goals, and outcome goal-setters may accidentally tramp all over their partners' enthusiasm because they are unable to see them as goals.


• Some need to be sure of their own commitment to a goal before mentioning it to anyone else, even a partner.


• Some are so afraid of creating conflict by mentioning a goal that they can do it only in anger.


• And some have grown to suspect strings attached to any support for their goals, like an expectation of their automatic support for a partner's goal. If you're rummaging about for something to support as you set your own new goal, the strings will be very obvious.

The second question is a lot more interesting. How can they court support for their own goals?

Start with the very reasonable assumption that your partner who pledged to love you does and wants to show it. This might not be true, but start with this assumption in your quest to discover how to get support, or you might get mired in fear of losing your mate.

If your spouse loves you, he or she wants to wholeheartedly support your goal. Any failure to do so results from resentment towards you over some other issue or fear of what your goal will impose upon your partner. We are usually rather aware of the first and clueless about the second, so let's talk about how your goal affects your partner.

Here is an example from the Success Team I mentioned earlier:

One has a hubby who has been really stressed about her taking time to go to our success team meetings and training with me to run a half-marathon.

Remember back when we were first falling in love, and a partner's distress over time apart seemed like a sure sign of a good relationship? Sometime later, it feels like we've lost our freedom. And we fall into either-or thinking: either I keep my freedom or my partner is really stressed.

But issues like this are seldom either-or. Finding that Third Alternative that allows for our goals and our partners' peace of mind is the answer. To find it, we need to see beyond the first-glance issues.

Her partner is not necessarily stressed by the time she spends on running or meeting. He may be stressed by having too many items on his to-do list. He may be stressed by the story in his head of why she's doing these these things. He may be stressed by how little time they now carve out for couple time. He may be stressed by a belief that she is not grateful for what he does with his time, when he would rather be spending it on a hobby or a new goal.

One of them needs to jump the fence and say, "I want you to have this. I really do. I want what I need, too, not instead, and I am eager to brainstorm together how we can have both."

One husband's stress level went through the roof when his wife went off for a five-day workshop to learn to be a writer. Both had recently retired, and he was becoming so obnoxious she wasn't sure she wanted to return from the workshop. And then she realized he might believe her new plans conflicted with his travel plans, even though she was looking forward to combining writing with travel, because they had never talked about how to have both. She's published two books now and can write off travel to places where she runs workshops or does book signings.

Here is another example from that Success Teams leader:

another has a hubby who is upset that I motivated her to go on a girls' only trip for her 40th birthday...He is insecure about the fact that she did not plan a special event for him to share with her on that day....(She went with me on my girls' trip on my 50th!)

Of course he's insecure. Telling your husband that you would rather not celebrate a milestone with him marks a change. It opens up all sorts of possible stories about the future. He cannot tell if it is a change in their relationship, a change in her approach to life that he will not like, or simply a different plan for a milestone day. And the human brain almost always goes for the most dangerous story it can invent. And then it embellishes on the danger.

If he's still important in her life, she should say so. If her milestone affects the man who loves her, she can surely come up with a second celebration to mark it with him. His insecurity has nothing to do with who she plans to be with on her birthday. It's all about what his future role in her life will be. The number of possible Third Alternatives for turning a conflict into an opportunity is huge, as long as she starts with, "I really want you to help you feel secure about our future, and I want to mark this milestone with you, and I want to travel with my girlfriends on my birthday. Let's figure out how to have all three."

By the way, if you have a dream you want to pursue, I will be launching my next international Success Team in May. We'll be meeting by phone from 10-noon EDT on Saturdays for 8 weeks. Leave me a comment if you're interested.

Do you know why this happens? It's really not sunspots affecting the guys and gals we married. Usually, it has almost nothing to do with how much love they want to offer us.

Remember that story about the fellow who asks for help searching for his dropped key in a dark parking lot? The helper asks, "Where did you drop it?"

"Over there."

The helper asks, "So, why are you looking here?"

"Because the light's better."

If you're thinking your spouse would take out the trash, fix your favorite meal, praise you to your mother-in-law, initiate sex, remember your anniversary, or put a little more effort into shopping for your birthday if he or she loved you, you are looking where the light is better. And you won't find love there.

Once upon a long time ago, when I was a freshman in college, my boyfriend of almost two years asked me to ride with him in a cold rain to purchase something he needed for an architecture class. The sun was going down, and I felt the early signs of a cold. I did not want to ride my bicycle in this weather. He said, "If you loved me, you would ride with me." And in that moment, I knew I never wanted such an awful expectation.

I could have countered with, "If you loved me, you would protect my health." But I didn't. I said, "Then I guess I don't love you." And it was over. I thought I had loved him well, but I was not willing to do this to prove my love.

Years later, I forgot all this as I kept ruminating on all the things I thought my husband of 13 years should do for me if he loved me. I so wanted to will those keys to show up where I felt comfortable looking. It did not work. I felt unloved, no matter what else he did for me.

Now my mantra is "Expect Love." Anyone who married you would love to give you some. Those other expectations, those "If you loved me you would _____" expectations, keep us from finding the love we're offered and make it a lot less fun to love us. We all have a few, the signs of love we simply cannot live without. But the others are making us and those who love us miserable.

Love is endlessly surprising if we are willing to look for it where it can be found, instead of under our favorite street light.