Loving your city from good to great
After 83 years, Connecticut couple John and Ann Betar were declared the nation’s longest married couple in February 2016, by California-based Worldwide Marriage Encounter. When asked in a Twitter chat how they did it, then 100-year-old Ann said, “It’s a lifelong thing. How do you define love? Through actions, understanding, little things. … ”
But since the daily, through-thick-and-thin acts that evolve into relationship glue over time don’t titillate like the love stories out of Hollywood — either in the tabloids or on the silver screen — our communal perception of love, even our expectation of love, often falls short of what the Betars share.
If we categorize love in three phases — attraction, infatuation and commitment — the tendency is to stop the love after Phase 2. The first phase, attraction, is the physical and/or mental draw of one person to another. Then comes infatuation, that rush of feelings a person gets just from being around the attractor. Both phases treat love as an emotion, as a noun.
Couples that last understand that the feeling is only the starting point. It serves as the trigger that may or may not be strong enough to motivate love to take its highest form — love based in action, a verb. This is Phase 3, in which a person chooses to be invested in the relationship long term and makes sacrifices for the sake of maintaining it. The problem is that most people want to participate only in attraction and infatuation.
These phases apply not only to people, but also to the places in which we live. Author Peter Kageyama in “Love Where You Live: Creating Emotionally Engaging Places” says that each of us has the power to transform the place in which we live from good to great. All it takes is the commitment to be an “emotional caretaker” of the city in which you reside.
“Many people have affection, pride for their city. But when this turns to love, it activates the senses more deeply. Love then becomes a resource and it helps to make the best of what we have got, because it looks at things through positive eyes,” wrote Charles Landry in the book’s foreword.
February, the love month, is the perfect time not only to re-commit to your loved ones, but also to consider taking that next step with Albuquerque. Look at situations you are in, people you meet, places you go until you find what you love. Though Albuquerque has been ranked at the bottom of some critical lists, it doesn’t take money or miracles to improve our condition. Loving where we live can be transformative.
A good starting point is the ABQKindness app. The city initiative was created to make kindness a habit in our community by challenging residents to track one million acts of kindness. The app encourages people to do simple things for others — opening a door, buying their coffee, letting them go first in line.
“In great cities, you see a spirit of generosity visible in small gestures and the large, and it is these that can make ordinary places extra-ordinary, even if they are down at heel,” writes Landry. “Cities are complex, and often it is the devotion of ordinary people that makes the difference.”
This past weekend, Worldwide Marriage Encounter recognized Horace Allen and Beatrice Ricks of Florida as the national winners of the 2017 Longest Married Couple Project. They met at an ice cream social in 1935 and married that Christmas. They were just ordinary teenagers, a news release said, but their promise to each other 81 years ago was extraordinary — “an inspiration and sign of hope to all of us.”
When CBN News asked the couple to divulge the key to their relationship, 99-year-old Beatrice had just one word: “commitment.”