The Preface

100 Days of Love is about a journey. It's about figuring out how to stay in love and how to keep romance alive. It's about dealing with dissapointment. 100 days of Love is not just about intimacy, it's about being committed to practice loving each other fully and completely and recording how that affects our lives.

3 Years ago, Rich and I eloped, on a rainy Saturday in September. No two people could love each other more. We used to ask each other if this was normal. We would wonder aloud if we had a love that was greater than all other loves, convinced, in fact, that we did. My heart felt so big, I could literaly feel the pressure, I thought I was having a heart-attack. Over the past 36 months, our crazy heart-attack love turned into a mellower kind of love. We used to cuddle for hours after work, now we move in separate directions- to the TV, to the internet. We used to race to the bedroom, jumping on the bed like children, last one in had to turn off the light. These evenings, I pick up a book and don't look up at him for nearly an hour. He comes to bed long after I'm asleep. There's still love. Our hands still slide together when we're driving or walking down the street. He buys my favorite coffee creamer and I (mostly) make sure his chef uniform is clean for work, (he despises laundry).

Six months ago we learned that we were infertile. No children. Walking across a dirt parking lot on a muddy Spring morning; I was meeting him for lunch. I thought he was going to say that everything was fine at his doctor's appointment and that we should just try a few new things. What he said was, "My sperm count is zero." So final. We cried, people walked by, and I buried my face in his shoulder saying, "it's ok," over and over and over. I was talking to my heart, I was talking to my husband, I was talking to this balloon of hurt that inflated between us and around us.

For the past six months, we've avoided the issue. We've stopped making love regularly because it feels a little bit useless. Rich had an appointment with a specialist that he never showed up for. Sometimes I cry, but mostly we just pretend that not having kids was our idea and we don't talk much about it. The other night I realized that it had been two weeks since we made love. Rich was trying to snuggle up to me and I was doing the usual "I'm so exhausted" routine. Laying there, I realized that we hadn't been intimate in two weeks and I had no desire to be. What happened to us? How did the love to end all loves end up routine and disappointing? I turned to Rich and said "I think we should have sex for 100 days in a row. Not tonight, of course, but starting soon... I'll set up a blog." My poor husband didn't know how to react. But the more I thought about what was happening between us, the more I realized how common it was. Many couples are crazy in love when they start together, then over time they lose that spark and end up complacently annoyed- with each other and with their own love life. 100 Days of Love is about making a conscious choice, everyday, to love each other. It's about making love, even when there won't be a child. We (that means me) will write each day about what we're learning and how this great experiment is going. (Starting tomorrow....)