by Melissa Charles

Created on: July 10, 2008

As a newly married, I complained that my husband was the least romantic person I've ever known. He didn't bring home flowers unless its an anniversary, or they've been picked by one of our children. He didn't write me mushy love letters, slow dance in our living room with me, or gaze tenderly into my eyes while whispering sweet words that weakened my knees while making my heart race. Sweeping me off my feet and carrying me in his arms up the stairs to our room...yeah, right.

He was, I finally acknowledged, hopeless in the romance department. As time went on, however, I realized he wasn't the hopeless one, I was. I had been utterly blind to the romance that my husband was attempting to give to me on a daily basis. Like many women, I had grown up on the media version of what romance is or should be. The candlelit dinners, the rose petal strewn baths, the dramatic overtures that make women cry and swoon.

He doesn't bring me flowers, but he will go to three different grocery stores in an attempt to find the requested flavour of ice cream. He will suffer through watching my preferred television programs without a whimper. He'll do dishes, gets up with the children on the weekends and takes them out to the park to ensure that I get to sleep in. Every morning, even though he's left for work before the children and I are up, he makes sure there's coffee ready for me. He bought me an insert for our tub that turns it into an almost jacuzzi for Christmas one year because he remembered how much I loved the hot tub in our hotel room on our wedding night. Its not dramatic, its quiet and steady. Its a daily offering of his effort to love me, to be a good husband and father. Its a constant thread in the fabric of our lives, easily overlooked or taken for granted. I was too busy bemoaning the fact that he wasn't romantic in the way I'd been told romance was supposed to be that I'd completely missed his romantic offerings, the effort he made every day to show he was thinking of me, taking care of me, loving me.

And, I will admit, after five years, he still surprises me. For a man that once abhorred country music, he's gone from tolerating it to now liking it. This was never more clear than the day he came home from work and told me to look up a song on-line, with the comment, "I heard this, and its about you."

Flowers wilt. Chocolates melt. Words fade. His romance to me is in action, by what he does. And now that I finally see it for what it is, I've learned to appreciate it and wouldn't trade it for anything.

And...he dances with me in the living room now.

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