What makes love last? I get this question quite a bit, because my husband and I seem to have found something unusual. What people don't know, is it was birthed from a sea of discord where nothing, and everything, made a mad kind of sense. I was a single mother of a two and four year old. He was thirty-six and had never been married. Or had a child. After dating six weeks, the lease was up on my apartment. He told me about a place two doors down from him that I should look in to.

Now that's love.

When a man tells you about a place two doors down, he's officially smitten. But I was too.

Love makes you do crazy things. Love makes life make sense. But what makes love grow, or last?

On many levels, falling in love can make every decision clear. It is the most exquisite of insanities. When nothing could be more magnificent than the way he holds the nape of your neck in his hand. Or the way his hair curls up from beneath his baseball hat.

We have been together fifteen years. With another fifty or so to go, it makes me reflect upon what it is we are doing right. Every year I fall more in love. But why? Life has only become more difficult. Health challenges have thrown us into a financial tailspin, medical bills sucked our retirement dry. We can no longer go out like we used to as pain wracks my every move. Needless to say I'm not exactly swinging on the chandelier in the bedroom either. That's if we had a chandelier. It's more of a ceiling fan. Although I have been known to dress up like a blow-up doll.

So how could it be that now, more than ever before, my heart skips a beat when he walks through the door? Why is it that even now, after four children, I cannot wait for him to walk past me just to feel the brush of his skin?

According to a recent study, 93% of married couples feel love was the reason to marry. But what makes love remain?

The only answer I can come up with, is respect.

With every passing year, and every challenge we have faced, the severe illness of a child included, the one quality that has fed the passion I feel for my spouse, is the respect I have for him. Respect is hot. Respect lays the foundation upon which love can thrive. Respect allows love to devour your soul only to leave it blooming twice as large. Without respect, love is oil on a Teflon pan. All the sizzle and pop, without the traction to allow it to warm all the way through. Respect is the seasoning in the meat, and the warmth that seals the glaze. A loveless marriage is one thing. But a marriage without respect is a sentence without structure. It is a commitment to an idea that changes with the wind. And who would ever want to be swinging from a chandelier in a hurricane - without something so very real, to hold you down.