The Gaps in the Map

I am completely fascinated by Love Maps and the chapter on fondness and admiration!  Reading about them reminded me of the Love Dare I posted about last week.  At first glance, I thought I was doing pretty well with my own personal Love Map.  I met my husband, Berek, when I was twelve.  TWELVE!  We started “going out” when I was 14 and he was 16.  (To be fair, I was not LDS and I was two years ahead in school, so he thought I was his age!)  We only dated for five months the summer before and first part of our Junior year, had a dramatic high school break-up, and didn’t date again until we married five years after high school graduation.  During that “time off,” though, we did stay in touch and reconnect every so often.  To say we know each other well is an understatement.  

“Take, for example, one of the major causes of marital dissatisfaction and divorce: the birth of the first baby.  Sixty-seven percent of couples in our newlywed study underwent a precipitous drop in marital satisfaction the first time they became parents.”

That’s where we are 14 years later.  When we married, we didn’t plan on having children for quite some time.  We thought maybe we’d wait five to seven years...maybe ten if work and travel was going well!  We unexpectedly got pregnant on our honeymoon and had a baby before we could even celebrate our first anniversary.  And the babies just kept coming!  We had four beautiful daughters in five years and added three more children in subsequent years.

I wouldn’t trade our babies for anything, of course, but they have certainly taken their toll on us!  We do have a strong marriage, but our children are involved in every piece of the social pie, my husband and I both have demanding callings, we do a lot of volunteer work...and our Love Map falls by the wayside.  I drove 93 miles today, but made 25 stops!  We are just too busy to reconnect the way we used to.

I can’t wait to play “The Love Map 20 Questions Game.”  Berek has been out of town all week and I have been so busy that we haven’t talked much beyond FaceTime during dinner and family prayer over the phone.  I feel like we’ll have high enough scores, but I do want to fill in some of the gaps in our map.  I’m thinking that for our five date nights for this course (by the way, is that not the coolest school assignment ever?!), I want to work through some of the quizzes and questions in this week’s reading assignments.