Love is Ugly

I realized something today as I was crawling around wearing my husband's dirty knee pads, sweating my ass off, using a drill to screw deck board onto our new deck. Paul looked at me as brown, dirty sweat ran out from the bottom of the knee pads and said, "You've never been hotter," and he was serious.

Any relationship can have flowers, and romance, and getting gussied up for dates. Most relationships start that way. You get dressed up, you go out, you wear perfume, and your best panties, and a month or a year or more goes by and the relationship ends. It's easy in the beginning.

The real part of the relationship comes later. It's when you look at each during the ugly moments and realize you are still in love. It's funerals and farts and getting fat and being hateful with each other because it's just that day and it's staying. The ugly part is staying together no matter what life throws at you, no matter how bratty you might act, through tears and laughter, and realizing that you aren't that sexy 20 something anymore. And if you or your spouse thinks someone else is hot, it's being secure enough in your relationship to know that no matter how hot someone is your spouse isn't going to stray. And you don't stray because you know the grass isn't greener and your yard is pretty darn nice.

It's knowing as your crawl around in the hot sun, screwing on deck board, that your husband thinks your amazing. It's looking at your husband, who has spent every available hour on the weekends and after work for the last 2 weeks building a new deck, and thinking he's the most incredible husband ever.

Yup, anyone can have flowers. Not many people are lucky enough to get to the ugly parts.