The beauty of innocence
The beauty of innocence
Before everything got complicated, there was a way of seeing the world that we want to honor — not return to, but remember.
There is a temptation, after you have lived through hard things, to look back at who you were before and feel a kind of embarrassment. You see the earnestness. You see the unguarded hope. You hear in your own younger voice the certainty that didn’t survive. It is easy to dismiss that earlier self. To call her naive. To call him foolish. To treat innocence as a phase you were lucky to grow out of.
We want to push back on that, gently. Innocence had real things in it. Some of what we believed back then was not true, and we will write about that elsewhere. But some of what we did back then was the most real thing we have ever done.
We are thinking of what early love does easily. The way two people who are just starting out tend to talk for hours. The way they assume the best about each other almost without trying. The way they make rituals — a Sunday breakfast, a walk after dinner, a phrase that belongs only to them. The way they reach for each other. The way they want to learn things together, do things together, be in the same room. The way they serve each other before being asked. The way honesty comes easily because there is not yet much to hide.
None of these things are foolish. They are, in fact, what love looks like when it is working.
Bruce
I remember moving into our first apartment. It was old and not much to look at, but it was ours. I remember walking through it the first time. Thinking back carefully, I think it didn’t smell very good — but I didn’t notice it then. We carried in some old furniture borrowed from family and found at a garage sale: an old, well-worn loveseat with wooden handles and flowered cushions. A dining room table that wasn’t really a table and certainly didn’t belong in a dining room. A card table for a desk. An old mattress that had definitely seen better days.
For us, it was perfect. It was ours.
Val
One of the things I remember most clearly from those early months is sitting at the kitchen table budgeting. We wrote down our combined income and the expenses we had each month and came out with enough to actually put $20 in savings. For me it was the first time I felt that money was not something I had to face alone. Every paycheck we received and every bill we paid was something we were doing together. It felt like proof that two people sharing what they had could make a life.
We did talk about how much that meant to me, and I expressed my appreciation over and over again.
What the practices were
Looking back, we can name what was happening more clearly than we could at the time. The early seeing was not just an emotion. It was a set of practices.
We listened to each other. We told each other things. We assumed the best when there was any room to. We forgave small things almost before they registered as offenses. We made time. We built rituals — small repetitions that meant we had a life together and not just an arrangement. We touched each other often. We served each other in small ways without keeping score.
If you read a list like that, it sounds like advice from a marriage book. It is not. It is a description of what early love already knew how to do.
Something does change between innocence and what comes after. We will write about that in another post. For this one, we want to stay with what was.
Not return to, but remember
We do not want to return to who we were. The earlier seeing was real, but it was not deep. We had not yet been tested. We had not yet seen what we are capable of, or what our partners are capable of. We had not yet held each other through something that should have broken us. The version of love we have now is sturdier and truer and more our own than what we had then.
But we want to remember. We want to remember that we were once people who reached for each other without flinching, and we want to be those people again — on purpose now, with our eyes open. We want to remember that we once forgave small things without effort, and we want to keep forgiving them, even when effort is required. We want to remember the way every day used to feel like a beginning, and we want to find ways to let some days still feel like that.
If you look back at who you were before life got complicated and feel something like grief, we understand. Some of what you felt then was the truest thing you have ever felt. You do not have to apologize for having felt it. You only have to find what it taught you, and choose it again, in a harder light.
Some of what we believed at the beginning was not true. But what was happening in our hands and hearts back then — much of that was real, and it can be ours again.
When you’re ready, the next post is waiting.
Before we knew what we didn’t know →What was your beginning like?
We would love to hear what felt most real in your early days — what you would honor, even if you cannot return to it. Comments are moderated with kindness.
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