Building a Relationship

After a marriage of seven years left me a widow for twenty years, the most miraculous opportunity came to me.  It came in the form of a chance re-discovery of an old love, my very first....actually, the one and only man I ever loved.   That is a difficult admission to make.  It seems, somehow, shameful to admit that I married a man I did not love.  He did not love me, either.  It was a contract made as a result of mutual need to mutual advantage.  He died seven years after he proposed and six weeks before our seventh anniversary.  We had no children.  For the twenty years that followed, I made occasional efforts to find my love, and one August afternoon in 2009, we reconnected.  For the very first time in my, then, 61 years, I was looking at trying to initiate and build a love relationship with a very complex man.  To say that I was intimidated would be putting it mildly.  Men and women look at things differently.  They experience them differently.  They understand and interpret them differently.  It is as though we speak two different native languages that happen to share some words in common..  Although, usually, the definitions of those common words are not identical.  So here we are trying to build a structure together and trying not to be a remake of the Tower of Babel.  It takes more than simply being capable of making the translations and overcoming the obstacles......it takes life-altering motivation to do so.  We have been building our relationship for two and a half years.  I tell you truly.....it is the most important work of my life and the accomplishment of which I am the most proud.