I watched my husband struggle with the question. She asked him to start by telling why he fell in love with me years ago. My mind raced with all the reasons why I fell in love with him. My head was full with them, but he struggled.

I think he found it hard to say these things out loud to another person. However, if there’s one thing that therapy has made me feel it is that I shouldn’t try to assume anything about my husband. He laughed and said that I was from a place that interested him. He’d never met a girl from the Midwest.

She turned to me and I began, but in my mind I was thinking about what he had said. He fell in love with me because I was from an interesting place, like loving a kimono or a beer glass. Things hurt in therapy, so it doesn’t do the heart well to dig into the little things. Two weeks later I still felt myself gravitating back to that, him falling in love with me because I was from an interesting place.

I didn’t want to hurt him by picking on that moment. These things aren’t easy, but I would like to be loved because I’m ambitious, because I’m passionate, because I can write circles around most people even if I can’t talk circles around them. I would like to be loved because I get better the longer you know me, because I am quietly, wildly creative, because I can leave the house without makeup or a cell phone, because I’ll take the trash out or do the laundry and never brag that I did. He loves me for these things, I know he does, I’m just not sure that he knows that he does. Or maybe, actually, maybe it’s more that he does know but in his own private world they don’t add up to much.

I find myself often asking all of the many nagging voices in my head if he wished that he would have picked a different girl. I’ve asked him out loud a few times, before we were ever in therapy, but I can’t tell you how he answered. I can only tell you that it was not a resounding “No!” and everything else leaves my mind reeling in its own private world. Then there was our next therapy session when he said that our love is so rare—a closeness that we had a once in a million chance of finding, and we found it. Suddenly I didn’t mind being a beer glass. Secret Fourteen, Revealed. Because I am loved.