What's Love Got to Do With It?

Everything, according to a growing body of scientific research. Including our physical health and well-being. Some notes from the field, one year after falling in love.

As I write this, it has been one year since I was introduced to the man I love. Today, on our anniversary, it felt appropriate to finally reveal his identity and tell our story.

I have been hesitant about telling that story for several critical reasons. One, I wanted to give the seeds of our affections proper soil, water, and time to grow in private, unmediated. Yes, I know that sounds crazy coming from someone who does not shy away from writing personal stories for a living, but it felt important, to both of us, to keep the bubble of our privacy safe and out of the performative glare of social media for as long as necessary, as we navigated this new incarnation of we. Two, I’d been flattened by the pain of betrayal only a year and a half prior to meeting him, and rebuilding trust after treachery also takes time and privacy, as well as patience and vulnerability. Three, between us, collectively, we have five children—my three, his two, ranging in age from 17 to 28—and I wanted to make sure they were each on board with our blended family before I publicly announced its existence.

But four (and most critically), I wanted to make sure that my beloved felt comfortable coming out publicly with our news and his name. He’s a private person in general, but, more saliently, he is married to and continues to care for a woman living with advanced early onset Alzheimer’s. Therefore five: I wanted to make sure his wife’s parents—who have given us their blessing with such grace and kindness, it moved me to tears—were on board with all of this as well.

“Isn’t that hard?” people will often ask me, with the word hard doing a lot of work in that sentence. It runs the gamut, when directed at me, between, “I would never enter into a relationship with a married man,” to “How does that even work, logistically?” to “Alzheimer’s? How tragic. He must be sad all the time.” When referring to him, it can mean anything from, “How does he find the time to work full-time, take care of a wife with Alzheimer’s, raise two sons, and fall in love with someone new?” to “Doesn’t the sadness seep into the joy?”