Dr. Cheryl Fraser on Deeper Sex and Intimacy

Start with the soul mate idea, because it's wrong. There is no single perfect person waiting for you, and no better partner hiding somewhere beyond the one you already have. What mindful loving asks instead is that you keep arriving, again and again, with the person in front of you. You fall for them freshly by actually seeing who they are in this moment, not the version you met years ago and not the version you keep hoping they'll become.

The second myth sits right next to the first: that the thrill fades and can't survive the long haul. I won't pretend that complacency isn't real. People do get bored. They drift into disappointment, and that happens constantly. But I want to tell you about two people who kept the spark burning to the very end, my grandfather Norman and my grandmother Evelyn.

Norman was born in a coal mining town in Wales, where I also grew up. At 16 the path laid out for him was the pit, and then, most likely, black lung killing him somewhere in his twenties or thirties. He had other plans. He boarded a boat to Canada on nerve alone and ended up working for a prairie farmer through a winter so cold I can't really picture it.

When spring came there was a dance at the local farm. Picture him leaning against the wall with the other young farmhands, playing it cool, watching the girls arrive in their flowered dresses. Then Evelyn walked in. Something in his face switched on. He turned to the fellow beside him and asked who she was. The answer came back: that's Evelyn, and forget it, she's engaged to somebody else. Norman asked why that mattered. The friend repeated that she was spoken for. My grandfather said, famously in our family, "Not for long."

He won her away from the fiancé, married her, and they built a remarkable life together. I was fortunate that they stayed around until I was in my late twenties. And right up to the end, his whole face would light up the instant he saw her. It wasn't a small thing. It read as something closer to awakening, a kind of transcendent flicker every single time she came into view. I watched the tenderness between them, the sweetness, the friendship, the passion that never cooled. In their later years they went square dancing and took the RV all over the place.

Evelyn died first, and suddenly. It was only after she was gone that our family realized Norman had been developing Alzheimer's. We'd missed it entirely, because the two of them moved as one unit. She had been quietly dancing and covering for the holes in his memory the whole time. Once she wasn't there to fill those gaps, his decline became obvious very fast.