Love

I don’t know a thing about love.

Traders typically don’t. Trading is transactional—I will do something nice for you, if you do something nice for me. There is no unconditional love in trading. Business relationships continue, until they end, when they no longer make economic sense. This is the world that I lived in for a long time. Your worth was measured in terms of what you could do for me.

Unconditional love goes something like this: I will love you no matter what. There is nothing that you could do that is so awful that would make me stop loving you. Or, I will love you until you learn to love yourself. The people in finance that I know don’t usually learn about unconditional love until they have children. Then they post a lot of photos of them on social media.

Many people learn about unconditional love from their pets. But it is easy to love pets unconditionally, because they can never betray you. Cats and dogs will never let you down. They won’t cheat on you, they won’t lie to you, they won’t fail to live up to your expectations. Children can grow up to be stinkers and hate you in adulthood. Pets never will. As such, a relationship with a cat or a dog is very simple, and pure—and this is why the death of a pet is frequently more traumatic than the death of a person. Relationships with people are complicated.

I do know that love is an action, not a feeling. People get cause and effect reversed—they think that they feel love, which compels them to perform esteemable acts towards another person. It is the other way around. You perform esteemable acts towards another person, and then you feel love. I took an oath when I got married that I would love my partner in sickness and in health, until death do us part. If you’re not shitting your pants when you get married, I don’t know what to say to you. At our wedding, I was doing okay until the organist played the first chord, at which point I almost fainted. In the last 25 years of our marriage, there has been a lot of sickness. There have been good times, and profoundly bad times. If we had tapped out during the bad times, we wouldn’t have experienced the love that we have today.

On the mantle among the family photos is a picture of my wife’s grandparents. Her grandfather is still alive, at age 100. Her grandmother passed away a few years ago, at age 93. They were married for about 70 years. They are the only photos on our mantle aside from us and the cats. I suspect my wife put them there out of admiration—not just for their longevity, but the depth and strength of their relationship. Over the course of 70 years, there would have been be a lot of ups and downs, and probably a lot of points along the way that one or both of them could have pulled the ripcord. I doubt they ever gave it a moment’s thought.

A relationship evolves over time. First, you are lovers. Then, flesh being what it is, that goes away, and then you are friends. Over time, the relationship deepens, and then you become soulmates. I have been with my wife for longer than I was raised by my parents. A friend of mine got married about ten years ago, and he said that on his honeymoon, he and his bride sort of ran out of things to say. That’s not a good sign. They’re still married, and doing better than I expected, which is terrific. I can tell you that after 25 years of marriage, we have never run out of things to say, though we have told the same stories over and over again. My wife tells the same stories over and over again, and I just let her. Now, we are getting old and the memory is going and we really tell the same stories over and over again. I like them better each time I hear them.

My wife probably inherited her grandparents’ longevity. There is a very good chance that she’ll live to 100 or more. I, on the other hand, have a history of heart disease and cancer in my family. The men in my family rarely make it into their 60s. I might have ten years left, for all I know. I like to joke with my wife that she’ll be married to me for 40 years, and then she’ll be married to some other dude for 40 years. And he’ll probably be a complete tool. But that’s okay—I wouldn’t want my wife to become old and eccentric, rattling around in a big house with a bunch of cats, wearing dark sweaters. I wouldn’t want it for myself. Personally, I’m not very good at being alone. My wife went on a project for a summer back in 2013, and I lost the TV remote on the second day, and then didn’t watch TV again for the next six weeks. I’d be the first to test the thesis that one can survive on Chipotle alone. But most of all, I would miss her exceptionally dry sense of humor and her snarky comments on everything that passes by. At this point, we are each one half of a whole.

And I know that our relationship will grow deeper as we get older. We don’t have children (as a matter of choice)—we just have each other. Our parents will grow old and pass away, and then it will be just us with the cats, and we’ll lose the cats eventually, too. It will just be us. The stable, sane centrist and the crazy, volatile risk-taker. As we’ve gotten older, we’re doing that thing where we’re starting to look alike. We’re even starting to dress alike. We disagree on politics, a little; we each have one or two pet issues that we’re inflexible on, and we can agree on those. We each have our own roles in the relationship—I’m the dreamer, the big idea guy, and she executes on the details. We’re building a house together. We heard from everyone that couples get divorced over building a house. We haven’t had one argument yet, though the financial risk stresses me out, sometimes. In short, we’re a team, and a pretty good one, at that.

I have achieved a lot in my life: degrees, books, professional success, money, and music. But if you want to know what I’d like to be remembered for, it’s that I was a loving husband to my wife for many years. Every once in a while, you see successful people who’ve been been married a bunch of times—I had this guy who was married four times say to me that he kept picking the bad women. I was like, dude, you are the one common denominator in all of these marriages. Maybe it’s not them—maybe it’s you? So I occasionally run across these people with multiple kids from multiple marriages and messy divorces and their personal life is in an absolute shambles, and I don’t really care how much money they have—I wouldn’t trade places with them, ever. I wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk. I said that on Twitter one time, and I got shithoused in the replies. You wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk? The richest man in the world? No, I would not, because he has never experienced the love that comes with being in a loving relationship that spans decades. In my opinion, I am far richer. And if someday I ever get divorced, it will have been my greatest failure.

We don’t maintain photo albums. We tried, for a few years in the beginning, and then got too busy. I figure Facebook has all the important photos. But I don’t need them. I remember all the important moments—and the unimportant ones, too. Every minute, every second of a 25-year marriage (plus an eight-year courtship) condensed into a feeling—the feeling I hope I will have on my deathbed, as I pass peacefully into the next life while holding hands with my lifelong companion and best friend.

That’s really all that matters, isn’t it?