So Sweet
It’s so simple.
Remember the sweet things.
Of course, it helps if you have a list. Luckily Ellen Green does. In fact, the list of all the sweet things her husband Marshall said and did throughout their 20 years of marriage is 110 pages long. And she writes small.
Greene includes some of her favourite items from the list, along with recollections from she and her husband’s years together in her book Remember the Sweet Things: One List, Two Lives, and Twenty Years of Marriage.
The sweet humour:
“after I’d chewed him out for shrinking some of my cotton shirts in the laundry, standing at the washing machine, pretending to read a label: ‘This one says, ‘Rub with fine sand, then pound on a rock.’”
The banal, but sweet rituals:
“giving each other a high five whenever we cross a state line.”
Snippets of sweet dialogue:
Ellen: “Could you please get me a beer?” (as he settles into the sofa to watch a movie, after making dinner and cleaning up)
Marsh: “Now wasn’t it you that I asked only a few seconds ago, ‘Do you want anything else?’ To which you said no and gave me a beatific smile.” (as he smiled and got up to the to the refrigerator)
Ellen: “I never smile beatifically.”
And the, well, just plain sweet
“saying “I missed you at dinner” because he was seated far down the table and we couldn’t talk to each other.”
Okay, so Marshall was a bit of an overachiever in the nice guy department — not every guy’s going to send flowers and a thank-you note to your office the day after you make him a nice dinner — but most of us could do well to take more of notice of the sweet and simple nice things our partner does.
Though to be fair to the rest of us schmoes who take our partners for granted and focus on everything they don’t do for us, Greene didn’t set out with entirely altruistic motives when she started her list.
When she met Marshall, she was smitten. But, after a life of “bad relationships that I let go on too long” Green was determined not to let her smittenness blind her and decided to track all the bad things he did so she would cut her losses sooner. After four months and not a single list entry she started to believe that Marshall might not be such a bad guy after all. And, given she had 5 or 6 new pages to add to her “Sweet Things List” every year when she gave it to him in a Valentine’s Day card, it would seem she was right.
And while having his sweetness so duly appreciated and documented no doubt only encouraged more sweetness, taking note of Marshall’s sweetness also encouraged Ellen to take more notice of it.
“I felt like I had a quota to fill,” Greene tells me. “He got so much pleasure from the list, I didn’t want to disappoint him. It’s like I trained myself to notice when I was smiling, when I said thank you and what it was for. It forced me to live in the moment and not take anything for granted.”
Of course, Marshall, being such a sweetie, felt guilty that he wasn’t making a similar list to give to his wife. I told him, “Get your own shtick, this is mine, you’re providing the material.”
It’s easy in long-term relationships to focus on the negative, to get complacent and forget to show our partner gratitude for the day-to-day stuff. Like your husband making garlic soup or always offering you the last cracker and dipping it for you. “If you’re waiting for grand gestures and big comic moments, you’re going to be disappointed,” says Greene. “It’s the ho-hum everyday stuff that makes a life.
“And who doesn’t like to be appreciated, to be made to feel special,” she continues. “My experience with jotting down small, everyday things is that the cumulative effect is very, very big. It gave Marsh so much pleasure. He’d revisit the list throughout the year, when I wasn’t looking.”
And, when Marshall was succumbing to Parkinson’s disease a couple years ago, they both revisited the list, rereading a couple pages a day until he died. If there were no other reason to make her list, Greene says, this wonderful last memory of her time with him would have been reason enough.
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Tags: importance of appreciation, Josey Vogels, Relationships, sweet things