For our third anniversary last Tuesday, J and I decided to eat at home instead of going out. Since I work downtown and he works way south of the city, going out on weeknights can be a scheduling challenge – plus we’d just spent a weekend on the Cape with lots of eating out. So we planned a special meal of manicotti with tomato sauce and homemade blackberry cobbler (a summertime favorite).
We did have our special dinner (and it was delicious), and we did exchange cards and gifts and spend some time laughing and talking and just being together. But we also had a long, rich, deep Skype conversation with a friend who is spending a life-changing summer interning in New York, and later I talked to my parents and told them all about our Cape weekend.
This connectedness has been a hallmark of our marriage – time alone together interspersed with deep friendships, for both of us individually and as a couple. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Our evening reminded me of a favorite passage from Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet, the first of her four memoir volumes:
It’s all right in the very beginning for you to be the only two people in the world, but after that your ability to love should become greater and greater. If you find that you love lots more people than you ever did before, then I think that you can trust this love. If you find that you need to be exclusive, that you don’t like being around other people, then I think that something may be wrong.
This doesn’t mean that two people who love each other don’t need time alone. Two people in the first glory of new love must have great waves of time in which to discover each other. But there is a kind of exclusiveness in some loves, a kind of inturning, which augurs trouble to come.
Hugh was the wiser of the two of us when we were first married. I would have been perfectly content to go off to a desert isle with him. But he saw to it that our circle was kept wide until it became natural for me, too. There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles have burned down.
I cherish this idea of keeping the circle wide – because it means we’re keeping our lives big, letting plenty of space and light into our relationship, allowing ourselves room to stretch and grow. There’s a balance to be struck, certainly, and we both cherish our solitude and just-the-two-of-us time. But I love the image of a wide circle, glowing with candlelight, making room for all the people we love and who love us.
How do you keep the circle wide in your life?
cakes, tea and dreams 
Katie, that made me happy. Aaron and I definitely experienced this in or marriage, and now, five years later, definitely have seen our capacities for love grow exponentially though our marriage. Thanks for the great quote!
What a stunningly beautiful post… I love the manicotti and cobbler dinner, and I love the way keeping your circle of wide spreads the love. For us, it’s a challenge to have a circle at all — to move beyond two or three or four people that we know in each place we live. I have always treated my closest friends like family and I think the notion of “keeping the circle wide” is a very beautiful expression of that — I plan to adopt it in the future. Thank you for making me think about circles and widening.
I like this very much – it’s something that I’ve often thought about but never really heard anyone put words around. As a single person, one of the things that I note and appreciate about “couple friends” of mine is when they keep the circle wide. I love feeling like I’m included and not the odd single friend who doesn’t fit in their world. It adds a certain richness to my life that’s lovely and vital… and hopefully I can add a bit of richness to the circle, as well.
I love Madeleine L’Engle, and every time anyones quotes the Crosswicks journals, I have to go get mine and re-read them all again (for the umpteenth time!)
It is a challenge to keep the circle wide – time and space are the biggest deterrents. As you get older, like me, illness and death have a way of shrinking the circle, just when you need it most.
I wish you and your husband many happy years, and an ever-widening circle of love and friendship!