One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to finish reading a couple book series. One of these series is written by Emily Giffin. She’s the author behind a five book series that all got started with “Something Borrowed,” made into a film with Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin. The third novel in the series is “Baby Proof.”
It’s one of those tales that makes you realize how true love can defeat anything. Not right away maybe, but it usually wins out in challenging, difficult situations eventually. It doesn’t necessarily makes sense, but like the age-old saying, “if it’s meant to be, it will be.”
Without realizing that I was getting this type of true love reinforcement throughout the book, only until the end did it click for me and made me reflect back on my own love life. So without giving away the ending, here are some of the moments in the book that now looking back strike me as hitting the nail right on the ‘love’ head.
I shake my head and say, “I can’t have a baby just to get Ben back.”
“Well then,” he says slowly. “I guess he’s not your soul mate…So that should be a consolation when you’re looking up their future marathon results.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask, feeling oddly defensive. As much as I want to feel okay about Ben in the present, I don’t like the implication that what we had wasn’t, at one time, the real thing.
“Well, because,” Ethan says, “you’d do anything to get a soul mate back, right?…I mean, that’s the nature of soul mates. You know, Romeo and Juliet swallowed poison to be together…So if Ben were really the one for you, don’t you think you’d go ahead and have his baby?”
Excellent point.
Essentially, he was just saying what we’ve all heard a million times — love conquers all.
The most basic, yet often forgotten, principle.
“I realized, almost in an instant, that I no longer bought all the propaganda about relationships ending because of bad timing and incompatibility and outside influences, like wanting or not wanting a baby. A baby is huge — it doesn’t get much bigger than that — but so is religion and age and geography and being married to other people and feuding houses and so many other seemingly insurmountable factors that couple encounter and defeat when love is true.” …
But more likely it’s because she’s finally in the kind of sincere relationship where you follow your own gut about things rather than polling your friends at every turn.
A friend once asked me why I don’t ever vent about my boyfriend with our girlfriends. Without ever thinking about it before, I told her that if there’s something that bothers me, I just talk to him about it. It doesn’t make me feel better to talk about it with friends. The other thing is that I’ve known my boyfriend longer than the majority of my friends, so I can talk to him as my boyfriend and best friend.
We will likely be asked to tell it again tonight. I’m sure we will roll our eyes and say, “Again?” while secretly relishing every part of the story — our story… Perhaps I will imbue it with the literary significance that was never lost on me: There we were in O. Henry’s booth, playing out our own version of the “Gift of the Magi.” Each of us willing to give up something for the other, for love.
Having met my soul mate so young in life, our love has often been questioned, misunderstood, not taken as seriously in the eyes of others. For the longest time, that bothered me. A few years ago, having our own time apart, nothing was more clear to me that our love was worth it. That confidence, in knowing, is all I needed to no longer care what others say or think. We’re building our story our way, and there’s something pretty cool about that.
Have you learned any lessons in love and relationships?
Meredith Stevens
Here's To The Dash 