The other day I was reading Kveller’s eletter (do you get it? Sign up here!) and one of the headlines stuck out to me. It said “Love and Marriage: After baby, is marriage at the bottom of your to-do list?” Beyond being amused by the double entendre (get it? to-do? yes, sometimes I am an 11-year-old at heart), I thought about how my marriage has changed since having a child. It’s not that we don’t spend time together–we do. But the quality of that time is different. (Add to this that I work part-time and from home and well, marriage sometimes IS at the bottom of the list.)
So with Shabbat coming up, the day of rest, my husband and I have decided to play hooky. Our babysitter is coming and we are spending the afternoon together on Friday. We’re taking a long walk, we’re eating lunch at one of our favorite Brooklyn restaurants, and we’re going to the movies–in the middle of the day! We’ll hold hands and remember what it was like when we were first dating, even if it’s just for an afternoon.
What’s special about a relationship, though, is that your life is built on a foundation of memories like that. So even if you just have a few hours to relive those memories, the feeling of happiness, nostalgia, and peace that comes from it can last a whole lot longer.