July 15th, 2026
Together in the Darkness? Or Alone in the Light?
It's 110 degrees in Phoenix tonight, and I'm home alone.
The Diamondbacks aren't playing:
There's no World Cup match. I've seen every movie I care to see and a few I didn't. So a man's mind starts to wander, and mine wandered toward a subject I've spent a lifetime trying to master. Love. The lasting kind. The kind that holds.
A word of warning. I'm no expert.
Not in dating, not in marriage, not in whatever quiet science explains why two people stay when it would be easier to go. My qualifications run about as deep as a birdbath.
Just a long life, a decent pair of eyes, and the stubborn habit of paying attention. Take what follows for what it's worth, which might be nothing, or might be everything. I've never been sure which.
Here's the question I keep contemplating tonight.
Would you rather stand alone in the light, or beside the right person in the dark?
Imagine the finest round of golf of your life. The prettiest course on earth, not a cloud above you, not a soul around you, every putt dropping like it was ordered up special. And you're playing it entirely alone. Now imagine the opposite. Some cold and miserable stretch of road, everything going wrong at once, and beside you the one person you'd choose over all the others, the two of you half laughing at how bad it's gotten, figuring the way out together.
I'd rather be miserable with her than triumphant without her.
If you understood that sentence without my having to explain it, you already know everything I'm trying to say. The rest is details.
Now the part nobody warns you about. It cuts both ways. It isn't enough to find that person. You have to become that person. A man has to grow into someone worth standing beside when the road turns hard. A woman has to become someone a good man couldn't imagine facing the dark without. Two people, each quietly working to be worthy of the other, and neither one ever quite finished.
You don't win each other once, at some altar, in some photograph. You earn it again, together, every ordinary morning, and every challenging morning, right up to the end.
And what you build together is the whole point.
Not who either of you is alone. What the two of you achieve in the same harness, pulling the same weight. The losses you endure and somehow outlast.
The battles you had no business winning, and won anyway, because there were two of you and only one of everything else. And sometimes those battles aren't fair. You don't deserve to have to fight them.
But life isn't fair, and with the right person beside you, the unfairness stops being the point.
Looking back, your most memorable adventures may be discomfort remembered with the right person.
The love stories that wreck me are not the ones that end with somebody walking away into a sunset. They end with neither person willing to be the one left behind. Two people who decided, somewhere along the way, that whatever came next they'd meet it the way they'd met everything else.
Together. Even the dark. Especially the dark.
I won't pretend any of this is easy.
It's the hardest thing most of us will ever attempt. But look hard at what comes easy in this life, then look at what turns out to be worth having, and notice how seldom those two lists share a name.
If life is about meaning, impact, legacy, making a difference, and I personally believe it is, then to achieve that with the right person at your side may be as close to a perfect life as any of us gets to touch.
So I'll leave you with the question I started with, the one I've been considering all evening while sitting here alone, looking forward to joining Teresa at our home in Sedona this weekend.
Would you rather stand alone in the light? Or beside the right person in the dark?
I know my answer. I've known it a long time.
The light was never the point. It was always about who's beside you when it finally goes out.
