Today is my wife’s 30th birthday.
Happy birthday Demetra!
And so, to celebrate, aside from the usual presents and cards and cuddles (which she is also getting), I decided to write down some things that I love about her.
If you’ve been following her work for any length of time, many of these won’t be surprises to you. Because her wonderfulness emanates through her writing.
Alright, here we go.
Here are 101 things that I love about my awesome wife, Demetra.
1. I love the shape of her face. Her cute little chin and her beautiful jawline and her perfect, natural eyebrows and her adorable nose and gorgeous eyes.
2. I love how often she comes over to me throughout the day (we both work from home) and hugs my head.
3. I love her voice. It registers to my body as if it were music composed just for my ears.
4. I love her courage. From putting so much of her process into her writing to moving countries for our love, she is so brave and I respect her endlessly for the giant leaps that she makes in life.
5. I love that her foot rapidly taps on the ground when she is happy (like Thumper from the movie Bambi).
6. I love that she 10% sticks her tongue out between her teeth when she is happy.
7. I love how much of a priority her family is to her.
8. I love her poetry. She is my favourite writer on the planet.
9. I love her range. I love that she loves first class air travel and 5 star hotels… but that she wasn’t at all hesitant to move out to the countryside, surrounded by farmland, and forego functioning toilets and potable water for the majority of a year.
10. I love that she reminds me to eat snacks.
11. I love how thoughtful she is, in general.
12. I love the wide-eyed, bottom-lip-out face she makes when she’s holding a baby.
13. I love how much our friends’ dog Bodhi loves her.
14. I love how good of a cook she is (seriously… you should see how perfect of a quiche she makes).
15. I love that, early-on when we first started dating, she specifically made a point of learning how to make some of my childhood-favourite meals.
16. I love how good she is at receiving.
17. I love how visible her joy is. I love her expressive face.
18. I love how sensitive she is.
19. I love that she bought a sweater that is covered in hearts.
20. I love that shortly after buying her sweater that was covered in hearts, we had a photoshoot booked… and when she said that she didn’t have anything to wear, I said she could wear her heart sweater… and even though she was shy/nervous about wearing it, she took some photos with me while wearing it because she knew how much I loved her in it.
21. I love her relationship to money.
22. I love her trust in money.
23. I love that we share our money. It truly feels like we’re on the same team.
24. I love how tall she is. I love our height difference.
25. I love her hair. It is soft, it is pretty, it is unique.
26. I love that I’ve gotten to help wash her hair over the last year.
27. I love that she hasn’t gotten a haircut in several years.
28. I love how flexible her identity is. I love that she’s always changing.
29. I love her curiosity, and sense of wonder in the world.
30. I love her appreciation of nature, and natural beauty.
31. I love how encouraging she is of me and my friendships with other men.
32. I love how easily she has formed a community of her own friends over the last year, since we moved.
33. I love how much she laughs.
34. I love the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles.
35. I love that she had the forethought to buy us a small, inflatable, backyard swimming pool during a significant heatwave this past summer. It drastically improved our week of abnormal, peak heat.
36. I love how particular she is about the plates/bowls/platters/kitchenware we have.
37. I love how her sense of style/beauty/love of nature has shaped the love and warmth in our home.
38. I love and trust her intuition deeply.
39. I love the depth and immense care in her heart.
40. I love how we go to bed. I love what we talk about. I love how we touch. I love how quickly she falls asleep.
41. I love how much she loves her truck.
42. I love that she sold her truck to move countries to be with me… and then bought herself another truck (same make and model) after we’d settled in together.
43. I love how much she loves the bald eagles that come to visit our land every Fall/Winter.
44. I love how intelligent she is. How quickly she synthesizes new ideas or takes in new skills or habits. I love that we read a lot of the same books as each other and then we get to discuss the ideas in them.
45. I love how patient she is with me.
46. I love how accepting of me she is.
47. I love how gracious she is. I love that there are times when she tracks a pattern of something I’m doing for months before mentioning it. And I love her discernment. Knowing full well that she only names the things to me that need to be named, and that she (more likely than not) doesn’t name the things that resolve themselves on their own… that she knows she doesn’t need to name.
48. I love how passionate she gets about new things she’s learning about. I love that she is voraciously, endlessly curious about so much of the world.
49. I love how slow she wants to walk when we walk together.
50. I love that she wants to hold hands when we walk together.
51. I love the things she points out when we walk together (‘Did you see that bird! Look at that cat!’ That’s a pretty flower!’).
52. I love how little TV/Netflix she watches. I love that things will sit on our ‘to-watch-together’ list for months before we watch it… if we watch it at all.
53. I love how little she follows and cares about pop culture. I truly think she might know less about celebrities/TV/movies/music than any person I’ve ever met, our age.
54. I love how much she loves feeding me. Feeding me with food, and feeding me energetically.
55. I love how much she loves her nephew. I love that she sends him gifts that make her think of him, even when there’s no birthday/holiday to justify it with. Just… presents, just because.
56. I love how much she loves Gerbera daisies.
57. I love how quickly she burns through the food she ingests, but that she can only eat a little bit at a time. Small amounts of fuel, often. Like a little wood burning stove.
58. I love how effortlessly she adapted to our rural life.
59. I love how insightful she is. I love that I never regret going to her to ask her opinion about something (my work, how to handle something socially… whatever it is).
60. I love that she doesn’t mind that I love having a super-stocked pantry. You can never have too much sea salt, honey, and coconut oil on hand. And whether she agrees with my preference or she simply tolerates the levels to which I like to be stocked up… I’ll never know. Because she loves me just the same either way.
61. I love how thoughtful of a gift-giver she is. I am truly a difficult person to buy for. Both because I don’t like owning many material things, and because the rare thing that I want I just buy it for myself. And still… with this being the case… she still manages to perceive and fill little gaps in my life in ways that bring me a lot of joy. For example, I never knew how much I wanted a super-soft pair of grey sweatpants until she got them for me.
62. I love how often she says, ‘I cannot believe that that is the case,’ as if she were a proper old British grandma… and not a 30 year old Greek woman.
63. I love how energized she is by socializing with her friends.
64. I love how excited she gets to host people for dinner, and/or host friends or family for multi-night stays on our land.
65. I love the level of detailed research she engages in when she’s considering getting something new for our home (whether it’s a larger thing like an aspect of our water, toilet system, or greywater management… or a smaller thing like serving platters, new side plates, or the colour of grout that will go between our tiles for the new hearth. Nothing is treated like a small thing, and her level of curation brings magic to our home every day).
66. I love how she often knows when I’m hungry before I do.
67. I love that she starts all of her voice notes to me with, “Hi my love!”
68. I love that she sends me voice notes, knowing full well that she is the only person in the world that I want them from. Both because I find the medium cumbersome, and because of how much I love hearing her voice, regardless of context.
69. I love how, when she’s reading a book she likes, she makes little sounds of approval, interest, and enjoyment.
70. I love how immersed she gets in movies. I love that when she first watched The Matrix, she literally said, ‘Oh no… oh my goodness,’ aloud.
71. I love how much she loves flying.
72. I love how loving she is with me when we are in the middle of airplane turbulence and I am *not* handing it well.
73. I love how much she loves country music. And that she has so many country songs fully memorized.
74. I love that when she was rolling around in the freezing cold, inflatable, backyard swimming pool (during the aforementioned heat wave) she proudly exclaimed, ‘I feel like a slippery, wet hippo!’
75. I love the time when we were watching a cooking show on Netflix, and the presenter said that she liked putting the marinade about one knuckle deep… and curious Demetra looked down at her hand and slowly unfurled her index finger so that she could know what one-knuckle-deep looked like.
76. I love that she takes solo vacations and gives herself what she needs (space, nature, time for self-reflection and really being in her transitional periods).
77. I love that she also booked a solo trip to another country just to get a special kind of haircut.
78. I love the way that she walks. I love the sound of it. I love how she looks when she walks. I love the angle that she holds her head at when she walks. All of it.
79. I love how connected she is to the earth/raw nature.
80. I love how her she is… and I also love how impressionable she can be (from the right sources).
81. I love the way that she interacts with animals (birds, dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc.).
82. I love how she genuinely loves it when her people win. How abundant and trusting she is with life.
83. I love that she is playful, present, and engaging with children.
84. I love how she stacks pleasure (like eating dark chocolate with her feet in the ocean during sunset).
85. I love how much she loves her family’s dogs.
86. I love that she can turn on a dime. Going all in on something that is true, and then pivoting or dropping it as soon as no longer feels aligned.
87. I love how much she wants to be a mother.
88. I love that I have total faith in her ability to be a phenomenal mother.
89. I love how happy she is for me when I get to have/experience things that I love (like having our new woodshed built, or tending to a fire).
90. I love how good she is at meeting new people because of how curious she is about them.
91. I love that she finds cooking meditative/to be a fulfilling creative outlet.
92. I love how good of a teammate she is.
93. I love how competitive she is… even though she insists that I am the more competitive one.
94. I love how stubborn she can be… even though she insists that I am the more stubborn one.
95. I always love how she dresses. I love every outfit she has ever worn… whether she is fancied up in a dress for date night, or layered up in sweatpants, sweatshirts, and a scarf that is literally longer than she is tall.
96. I love how her forehead smells.
97. I love that she always tells me about her dreams in the morning (whenever she remembers them).
98. I love how willing she is to try new things (whether its eating a new kind of food, chopping wood, or anything else… she just jumps right in).
99. I love her relationship to truth.
100. I love how playful she is.
101. I love how willing she is to be all the way in life with me.