Julio Naudin and Jan Risher

December 2012. If you love them, send them away: A personal reflection on an old adage

Few would describe my husband as a subtle man.

He talks loud and laughs louder. He tells more jokes than anyone I know. Many of them cruder than they ought to be. His quick wit and humor are what initially drew me in—and for years I thought those characteristics made up a significant portion of the foundation of our relationship.

But looking back, I’ve now realized that the anchor of our relationship is his generosity—and the fact that he gives openly, without any expectation of getting back. Case in point:

Way back in 1992, I was twenty-eight and had lived a charmed life. Once I graduated college, I moved around and had found a string of appropriately challenging, fun and wonderful jobs wherever I landed.

However, in the summer of that year everything changed. I moved to Washington, D.C. with the easy assurance that I would find another wonderful job within a few weeks.

Economic times were tough. I applied for job after job and rarely even got an interview. After three months of looking, I decided temping was the way to go and flitted about from one job to another—until I got a call for a longer-term assignment. The job: sitting at a desk in the basement of a 31-floor skyscraper in Arlington and answering the phone, taking messages for the building’s janitors and repairmen.

Glamorous, it was not. And I did it for five months.

It was five months that changed me profoundly. I had always perceived myself as a go-getter, but here I was in the basement answering phones for janitors — and I was a temp at that. To the people who walked by, I was invisible. I began to question and doubt who I was.

All through this grand adventure, I was dating this fellow named Julio.

He was on his way up the corporate ladder, and it seemed I was on my way down.

Even still, he asked me to marry him.

Something about the whole of my situation made me know that I wasn’t in a good place to say “yes” at the moment. Instead, I said, “Hold that thought.”

I had always wanted to go live in Europe for at least a year. I applied for and was awarded an appointment to teach English in Czechoslovakia. The only problem was, I had to buy the round trip airfare. In my months of moving across the country, job searching and temping, I had spent my minimum savings and was barely getting by. I didn’t have a way to make it happen, but I was determined to do so.

As I frantically saved every penny I could to make my dream possible, Julio watched and encouraged. When the day came that I’d saved enough to buy the ticket, he took me to lunch.

“I’ll buy the ticket. You keep your money for spending once you get there. You’ll want to see as much as possible while you’re there,” he said.

He was right. And his generosity went beyond buying to ticket, to sharing my dream. When I asked him about it recently, he said, “You’re digging up ancient history there. This wasn’t a pre-planned thing — I’m not a schemer or a good chess player. If you would have said, ‘I want a tutu and dance at the Washington Monument, I would have bought you a tutu, taken you over there and taken pictures. Instead, you wanted to go to Europe.’”

And so I did. Between the time I got my assignment and the time I got there, Czechoslovakia decided to split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in the so-called Velvet Divorce. I arrived in Slovakia when the country was twelve days old.

It was January and it was freezing. In the middle of the Carpathian Mountains (or Tatry as they’re called in Slovakia) in a small village called Stara’ Lubovna where I ended up teaching, it was -27ºF on the day I arrived.

I was given a one room flat in an old Communist-era building. I walked to school each day and home again. The people took me into their lives, and I took them into my heart. It was just the adventure I was looking for.

Throughout my adventure, Julio waited for me. And when the time came to come home, I was ready.

In our recent conversation, he said, “Obviously, I asked you to marry me before you left. I was already convinced. Maybe you’re the one who had to think about it. What if I would have held my guns and said, ‘If you leave now, you’re crazy. If you leave, I won’t be there when you get back.’ Maybe you figured I was somebody who gave you enough room to do what you wanted to do. What have you ever wanted to do that I’ve kept you from doing? Nothing. It’s not a threat to me. It makes you happy — and I want you to be happy.”

A few months after I returned, we became officially engaged and got married. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there was a part of me that banked on his generosity of spirit and encouragement to be who I was. For sure, his willingness to “hold that thought” and facilitate my journey set our entire marriage and lives on a different and more enjoyable course. I am a better wife and mother because of his bigheartedness and patience — and I pin much of what makes our relationship work back to that open-hearted decision he made. And still these nineteen years later, his magnanimous spirit is the rock of our love story. I remain eternally grateful.