It’s In The Words Unspoken: A Country Yearning For Visible Love

Marriage, when at its best, is a lifelong commitment to honor, uplift, protect, nurture, and repeatedly fall in love with another person.

That’s what makes it wonderful. And that’s what makes it hard.

My husband and I are coming up on 30 years since saying our vows. Vows we have renewed three times along the way. In our early years, we were like every other young couple — we labored under the delusion that married life was supposed to be like a Hallmark card. Sparkly, romantic always, a poem come to life. Easy, like breathing. That love just happens, continues to happen with little to no effort because, well, LOVE.

And like pretty much every young couple, we soon discovered that it was about figuring it out, suffering growing pains, pushing, pulling, fighting for our space, being insecure, fighting for where we ultimately would fit in the other’s life.

That is where so many relationships begin to break apart. What do you mean we have to work at it? What happened to that white hot heat that carried us to the altar? The fear that effort translates to it not being real is what dooms so many new marriages.

In our early years we had our trials by fire. Based on the Holmes and Rahe scale of life stressors, we were ticking them off pretty fast. Moving to a new place. I left behind a job I loved to follow him, not knowing the identity crisis I would encounter. We got married. We got pregnant. We lost that pregnancy. We got pregnant again. We lost everything in a natural disaster. We were displaced to a new city, living in a hotel room with a baby for months.

Turmoil. Emotional upheaval. Learning that we all grieve differently. Allowing someone to see us at our lowest moments. Seeing someone at theirs.

I will never forget the moment I knew something deeper was actually keeping us tethered. Regardless of surface tension, misunderstandings, fears — we were out together at a food street fair in Dallas. Having been uprooted from a tiny island, large gatherings were still a bit unnerving to us both. People everywhere, chaotic, and without a word, our hands found each other. No words, just the unspoken gesture of I’m here with you, you’re ok.

That reaching for one another has never stopped. No matter what is happening in our lives. No matter who is unhappy with who, what tension might be in play, regardless of where we are, who we are around — that simple reach for the other, especially when we are out, feeling exposed, has never stopped.

Through the years others have commented on it often to us, some have poked fun at us for it, others have asked our children if we are always like that — the whole touching thing. I like to think that behind their feigned disgust when they huff out “yessss” is the same sense of security and love being spoken with no words between their father and I.

Watching the Bidens last night, and viewing how Kamala and Doug touch so easily, I know what I am seeing. Not just love, although make no mistake, it is deeply, deeply there. But the touch is easy, second nature, it just happens. It is nurturing, it is reassuring, it is full of pride that they are the one getting to reach out and embrace this other amazing person.

It is desperately what is needed in the leadership of this country. Gentleness. Compassion. Understanding. Warmth. Security. Strength.

We know we have been missing it, yet have not truly been able to put it into words. At least I could not until last night.

Regardless of how you viewed Barack and Michelle, there was no denying they are two people deeply in love with, deeply in respect for, one another. They touch easily, they speak about one another with no effort. Their spoken words as organic as their reach for one another. And there was always something about knowing our leader was at ease in his most important relationship, was supported, was adored, was respected, that translated to the care of this country. That his adulation of her was completely obvious only cemented that further in the national conscience.

We were in good hands. Steady hands. Secure hands. Strong hands. The national family was able to sleep at night.

What we have been dealing with the past 3 1/2 years is the polar opposite. A man for whom women are commodities, pussies to be grabbed. A man for whom casting them aside for newer models (literally) is second nature. A cheater, a grifter, a serial molester. And a woman who saw the golden toilets and wanted in. There is no warmth between the Trumps. No easy conversation, no lingering looks, no playful flirtations, and never the hand reaching out for the unspoken reassurance of the other.

Ever.

We see the prop hand routinely shooed away. We catch the glowering face when she thinks the cameras are not watching. We see a business arrangement, not a happy, committed, anchored-in-love marriage.

I honestly cannot envision holding that office and all of the demands therein without a trusted partner. Without the one person who is bedrock, security, solace, sanctuary, everything.

Last night we got to listen to Dr. Jill Biden talk about her life with Joe and their sons, “I fell in love with a man and two little boys standing in the wreckage of unthinkable loss, mourning a wife and mother, a daughter and sister.”

She was only 26 when they met, when they found one another, when she fell in love with them all, when their life built on enduring love, connection, support began. She saw someone at his absolute lowest, lost in a grief none of us want to imagine, and their connection saved him, them, her.

We found that love holds a family together. Love makes us flexible and resilient. It allows us to become more than ourselves, together, and though it can’t protect us from the sorrows of life, it gives us refuge, a home. How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole: with love and understanding and with small acts of kindness. With bravery, with unwavering faith. We show up for each other in big ways and small ones again and again.

This. Love. Resilience. And I mean this in the most admirable way — they reek of it.

They have endured apart, they have endured together. They have been tested, bent, stretched to breaking by life’s curveballs, life’s cruelest thefts. They have been forged. And they have come out the other side stronger, bonded at the deepest levels, experts at the unspoken words, the reach.

As she finished her speech, he appeared, reaching for the familiar touch, the reassurance, the easy love that simply flows. She leaned into his embrace. Naturally, comfortably, into the arms that for her translate safety, security, home. And as only a proud, secure man would do, he introduced himself as “Jill Biden’s husband.”

As much as you may roll your eyes, these things matter. They matter in the measure of a man, a woman. They matter in how they relate to the world around them, the empathy they are able to display for others, the ease with which they cajole, communicate, comfort friends, family, complete strangers.

When you are secure, you are unafraid of investing in other people, taking on their troubles, working for solutions that may have zero bearing on your own life, but may mean the world to another person.

Kamala and her husband Doug display this ease, this nurturing, this admiration, and adoration to one another. Though still in the halcyon days of early marriage, what they have built together is meaningful. In public, she reaches for his touch as easily as he reaches for hers. In it they find reassurance, that unspoken message of I’m here with you, you’re ok.

These four people display decency, hope, faith, and love with each interaction between them, with each hand reaching out to others.

They are everything Trump is not, everything his marriage is not, everything his leadership is not. In him there is only hubris, self importance, ego, narcissism, insecurity, jealousy, and emptiness. It is why our national family is adrift, afraid, dying by the thousands. Because those meant to lead us, inspire us, make us feel secure are not leaders, are not inspiring, are not secure themselves.

The reach. The touch. The security and strength they convey. It matters every single day in my life with Rudy. And I see every single day the transformative effect it has on me, on him, on our children, our friends, our family, his employees and colleagues. When you know you are invested in, valued, cherished, it is easy to invest in, value, and cherish others. It simply becomes who you are.

And it is in the unspoken words that I see the transformative effect Joe, Jill, Kamala, and Doug can have on a nation.