Soft Yoke

My husband and I don’t usually hang out together. This really happened in the early days when everything was new, we were younger. Well, here I stopped typing and kept myself trying to find another excuse to justify why we don’t go out anymore, I smile. The truth is we never got used to go out for dinner or something like that. We enjoy staying at home. I go out with my friends, but very little too. I use to go to the bank, to the supermarket. I stay at home a lot.

All this just to say that sometimes we meet on the street, me and him. Yes, that’s what I meant. And when I see him on the other side of the street, just for a second or less than a second, I feel some kind of strangeness. It’s something like if I say to myself: I know this guy from somewhere. I repeat, it’s less than a split second. And he also has this feeling. I must confess that I really love meeting him like that. It is as if we still flirt. The heart races, I smile, he smiles, I go straight to him, he caresses me. It’s so beautiful!

And that happened just today. I went out and who do I see? That handsome guy that my husband is. I grinned and so did he. It even seemed like we hadn’t seen each other for ages and ages. And after lunch, almost asleep, he said something about me, something like “you’re cute”, but I understood that he was talking about me seventeen years ago. He smiled and said: “No, I’m talking about you now, today, cute, thin waistband, smiling, coming to meet me”. I just loved it!

I always hear that a good marriage is a lottery, is a needle in a haystack, I don’t know. A marriage has its difficulties. In the world we always will have afflictions and bad storms, even a good marriage. I know even a happy marriage has its burden and its bonus like any situation in life.

For example, my friends are staying for about two months in Portugal and they called me to go. I really wanted that, oh my God! But I won’t stay two months away from my husband. No. I don’t want it and neither does he. In a marriage, there is a yoke. There is no denying it. I am not entirely free. I share a life with my husband. He never demanded anything from me, nor I from him. Everything is implicit, willingly, companionship, complicity, caring for each other, understanding, and above all, a good deal of daily forgiveness. Its a soft yoke. We have no “strings attached”. No. We have ties. We know that the bond that binds us is strong. It doesn’t have to be on paper. It doesn’t have to be said. It is love.

Isn’t that what Jesus meant by “my yoke is easy”?

This story was published in The Cotton Thread — weaving life with words. If you want to be a writer in our publication, click here.