Secret Sauce
I never realized how much I missed it until I had it again. Sharing. The coming home from work and school to tell what you did, to hear what others did. To answer the question, how’d it go today. Great, grandpa. I got three popsicle sticks for doing good things. Or to have a story unfold about adventures with a spreadsheet and computer illiterates. Or to hear about walking the balance beam. Or to tell how I fixed the front door.
It might be the secret glue of marriage and relationships and family life. And it’s not just that we share, but we’re genuinely interested in hearing those minute details, those little things that were interesting to the sharer and are now interesting to us. And I think it might be how we measure the progress of a relationship. The increase in frequency and the quality of the sharing, or conversely, the lack of sharing, the shying away.
But of course, we always allow people to have secrets, because everyone has them. No one really tells all. But we can tell most. And that’s another secret about sharing, to feel free enough to share the deep thoughts, the maybe secret thoughts, the fears, the anxieties, the worries. But that’s hard and not always comfortable, because… judging. And that is maybe the real secret sauce of love, to know that you can share without being judged.