COMMITMENTS : There’s a Simple Trick to Finding a Lasting Love : Relationships: The most important ingredient is consideration--that is, caring about the other person and being there, because life is long and not all good.
What’s the most important ingredient in a relationship between a man and a woman? A friend of mine came up with one of the best answers I’ve ever heard, one her grandmother passed on to her.
“It’s consideration,” she said.
As her grandmother explained it to her, consideration meant caring about the other person and being there for that person. After all, her grandmother had said, life wasn’t all good times.
I was struck by the trueness of this bit of simple philosophy. Consideration should be at the base of all close relationships, but it’s especially important between spouses. Paraphrasing Grandma, life is long and it’s not all good parts.
The same woman who shared this philosophy explained that when she met her husband, there was no blinding flash, no heat and light.
“I was just struck by how nice he was, how easy he was to be with,” she said.
They fell in love over time, but she liked the person he was from the beginning.
There is a lot of wisdom here too. A lot of people think if they’re not immediately swept away, if there is no instant chemistry, then there can be no great love.
How people fall in love can be as different as the people who do the falling, but it needn’t be mercurial to be true. And, in the end, a lifetime of warmth is what counts. Heat and light can fade, but caring and consideration go on, feeding the soul of a relationship even years later.
“Even when I first met my husband, I could picture growing old with him,” the same friend said.
I knew immediately what she meant. I remember watching my husband playing with someone else’s toddler, and thinking what a wonderful father he would make. It is this ability to project what this person would be like years later or in the most important role you could choose for him or her that tells you respect and liking are there as well as love.
This is a tricky world we live in for a gentle kind of love. Lust is so often offered up instead, as if urgency were the only standard by which to judge the depth of one’s feelings. It’s a world in which old-fashioned values of kindness and consideration need rekindling.
But as my friend spoke about the importance of consideration at a lunch we were having, I saw a few women around the table lean forward, as if they were listening not just with their ears, but with their hearts. To have that kind of love is like being embraced for a lifetime, protected from the worst life has to offer by the devotion of one’s mate.
It reminded me of something my mother said right after my father died.
“Who will tell me I’m pretty anymore?” she asked me. “Even the day before he died, he looked at me and told me how beautiful my hair was.”
My dad had still seen her as his pretty wife, had still been considerate enough to pay her a compliment, to want her to bask in his praise.
Consideration may very well be the key to love that nurtures and love that lasts. When people can share that kind of love, it gives them the strength to get through life.
I thought of another friend who, earlier in the week, had been up most of the night with a sick child. That morning, her husband was picking up her mother from the hospital, after a brief illness. She mentioned that her husband and her mother didn’t get on very well, but there was no question that her husband would take her mother home, would take care of her. He would do it because he loved his wife, out of consideration for her.
It seems like the best part of love to me.