Day 70 – The recipe for the perfect love affair

Over the years a lot of my friends and people who’ve met me and D, asked what’s our secret? Why all this happiness after thirteen years of being together? Where does it come from? Aren’t we bored yet? I tried to think of an answer, but every time I came out blank, because there is no answer or advice or secret we could share. What I am going to do is try to compare relationships with cooking (you’ve read it right: cooking).

Whenever you start cooking something you love, you try to find the best ingredients for it. You will find the same exact ingredients in other recipes too, but combined in very different ways or with different spices added. Anyway, let’s assume we all love chocolate cake (I actually know people who don’t like it). Let’s further assume that we all try out the same chocolate cake, cooked in the same way, from the same bakery. At some point we will want to go and bake our own chocolate cake, because we don’t want to settle with just a taste or a piece, we want the whole thing for ourselves. So, we ask for the recipe and try to reproduce it. But when we get home and all the ingredients are nicely placed in front of us, we will try to make it even better, to melt our taste buds in pleasure even more than the one from the bakery did. Some of us will add more cinnamon, others more sugar, some more chocolate, others more syrup and so on. That is, in my opinion, the exact thing that happens in a relationship. There is no secret ingredient and no perfect recipe; it’s just a matter of taste and options.

I know people who have to work hard on their relationship and that’s the way it works for them; I know others who love to fight all the time and if they are happy, that’s just fine. I know a lot of people who got married after a month and stayed together their whole life and others who broke up after being together for eight years. There are infinite possibilities for a couple to be or not to be happy, but I think that if you find that special ingredient that makes your chocolate cake be the best it can be for you, it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it or not and it certainly doesn’t mean that your way is the best way for anyone else.

For myself, I will say that every year I discover a new ingredient in my recipe that makes me happy and I won’t give out any of them because that is one of the things my husband thought me: don’t share your happiness with the world; the world will try to take it away from you and make it look like it’s dirty. Believe me, I was outraged the first few years, but in time and after many battles with “the world” I understood his words. I will say one thing, we never had to work for the cake we baked together, but we had to protect it from a lot of hungry bastards and it seems that the harder they strike, the more delicious the cake gets.