These three couples know that love is not always easy. They talk about their ups and downs, but also about what helped them persevere.
“I would do it again”
When Kirsten fell in love with Sascha, then 35, at the age of 34, he was already terminally ill. She still wants him.
I already knew Sascha briefly through a friend when he wrote to me online via MeinVZ. First we emailed him intensively for four weeks – by then I had already fallen in love with him. He had such a great sense of humor and got to the heart of things. He also wrote me that he suffers from the incurable disease neurofibromatosis type II (NF2), in which benign tumors form on the nerves, usually the auditory nerve but also the optic nerve or the back. They aren’t dangerous at first, but do a lot of damage as they grow. Sascha had already lost his hearing as a result, and his lateral facial nerves were paralyzed by operations. That means he had almost no facial expressions. When we first met I didn’t know sign language and he was too proud that I write things down. He preferred to read my lips – and he could speak himself. It sounds as if it was doomed to fail, but we both felt: That fits! I had no doubts about whether we should be a couple, I just had to figure out how. And I’m good at finding solutions.
No one could say how much time we would have together. The doctors told Sascha when he was diagnosed at the age of 16 that he wouldn’t be older than 30. At the meeting I was 34, he just 35, so we hoped there were many more years to come and the doctors had been wrong. Until then, we didn’t want to let the disease rule our lives: we went on vacation, we were in movies with subtitles, we went to concerts where Sascha always stood very close to the speakers to feel the bass. And we talked about everything…
I’ve never had a man who “listened” to me so well, took note of everything and was always concerned about my well-being. Sascha showed me what real love means. Our secret as a couple was our loyalty. We agreed: when you fall in love, you take the person with everything that is attached to it. The fact that Sascha couldn’t move his face, for example, quickly struck me privately. I only ever realized it when we were sitting in a café and other people were looking at us funny. I got involved with him without any ifs or buts. And I was supported by my family and friends. After a year we got married.
Shortly thereafter, Sascha had a bad attack due to intracranial pressure: the meningiomas had grown so much that he could no longer be operated on. Then the doctors said, “There’s not much time left.” Or as Sascha put it afterwards: “You no longer need to give me an LP for my birthday.” Even after the cut, there were no taboos between us: we talked about our fears, death and what we wanted to do beforehand. The benefit of knowing that time together is limited is that you never fight over trifles.
In general, you get an incredibly good culture of debate with a deaf person: I always had to sit down and formulate things clearly. No one can yell at a deaf person because then they can no longer read the words. And as a woman, I also had to get used to the fact that the man doesn’t somehow guess what I’m thinking by the tone of voice.
What has always welded us together over the years was humor. We could even laugh at death. But Sascha was still there, and we made the best of it every day. He even learned how to cook, and when I came home from my job as a vocational school teacher, the meal was ready.
We were happy, despite the dark prospects for the future. It went well for two years, then we both had a really bad cold, Sascha got a fever, and then, in early 2013, there was that terrible day when he said to me: “Turn on the light!” But the light was on, and that meant: Now his biggest nightmare had come true, and he had also gone blind!
So that I could still communicate with him, I wrote the finger alphabet in his hand. From then on we had six weeks until his death. I took sick leave, first we lived together in the intensive care unit, then we went back home, where Sascha dictated his farewell letters to family and close friends for me. Every evening he said goodbye to me and every morning he said: “I’m still alive.”
On April 8, 2013 we moved to the hospice and he died a few hours later. It was terrifying and liberating at the same time. But he looked so peaceful afterwards that I haven’t been afraid of death since then.
When he was still alive, Sascha told me: “I’ll try everything to come back after death and give you a sign. Even if I poop on your car as a Condor.” He had always called all birds of prey Condor. When I went back to school for the first time after his death and then came back to the car, there was a giant piece of bird shit taped to my trunk. I had to cry then. He must have made it true.
After that it took me three years to find myself again. But the time with Sascha was so intense that I would do everything the same way again.
“Love is not just a feeling”
Birgitt Hölzel, 56, and Stefan Ruzas, 54, started out as an affair, then started a family and now work together as couple therapists.
They both had their first date in 1993 as students in Munich. “When we met, Birgitt said she was half-single,” says Stefan and laughs. “So there was someone else. I was also in a relationship, but Birgitt fascinated me. When we first met her, she wore one of those then-fashionable bodies with snaps at the crotch. And I thought: will I ever unbutton that thing?” he could!
The first night together turns into a playful affair. Relationship status: undisclosed for a year. Until Stefan spontaneously proposes to her in the Tyrolean mountains. They become a married couple, first work in the media industry after university and then decide to train as a therapist: why not pass on their know-how as a long-distance couple to others? “The magic formula is to stay playful,” says Stefan. “We call that micro-adventure that you have to create yourself.”
“Love doesn’t stay automatically,” adds Birgitt. “Every relationship gets worse and worse over time! Everyday life, stress, children, obligations: all of this leads to wear and tear that you have to work against constantly.” A good foundation is therefore only a time without children. “We had seven years to build our pair level.” Couples with kids are determined by others, their own needs then have to be planned.
In winter, for example, Birgitt and Stefan jumped into the lake together as a shared extreme experience. Once, on Valentine’s Day, Stefan kidnapped his wife: “I told her: Take gloves and rubber boots with you, and then I pretended in Schwabing that a secret mission was going to start any second.” Birgitt laughs and says: “We ended up in a float bath, a pool with salt water, where you glide weightlessly in the water with music and Prosecco.” Another time they went to a love hotel because crazy experiences create bonds. “I often say to couples: Walk backwards 1000 meters! Do something completely different than usual,” says Stefan. If a relationship is to last, it also needs meaningless interaction with each other.
“Love is more of an attitude than a feeling,” says Birgitt. Both consider throwing them away prematurely as a blemish of our time. Often it is enough to leave your own comfort zone. “We don’t judge it when people find it too exhausting,” says Birgitt. “But a long love doesn’t fall from the sky. It’s work.”
“I wanted him”
Miriam, 53, and Marc, 56, have been a couple for 26 years, two of which Marc had an affair. Miriam explains why she stayed anyway.
If a man cheats on me, I’ll break up immediately – I’ve always believed that. Until it actually happened to me…
We were together for seven years at the time, had founded a company, but I mainly worked in a publishing house. I was just getting started there, flew around the world and have to admit: I saw very little of my boyfriend back then – even when I was there.
One evening an employee of our company, nine years younger than me, rang the bell at our house, who had to leave her flat share as an emergency. My boyfriend and I let her live with us for the time being, two days turned into half a year. At some point I got the feeling: could something happen between her and my boyfriend when I’m gone? When asked, Marc declared me crazy, as did my best friends.
I made her move out anyway, looked for evidence but found nothing. It wasn’t until two years later, when we had a three-month-old baby, that I surprised them both. I collapsed then, the emergency doctor had to come. Later I asked a therapist: “How do I fall out of love?” I really thought that was it. But the therapist said, “You just want to go so he repeats it.”
And that was true: I didn’t want to lose this person, who was also my best friend. Then the work began: First, I needed his promise that he would never see the woman again. So we fired her. Then Marc and I talked all night, put everything on the table, did couples therapy, in which I understood why it had happened in the first place. He also said: “If I could, I would cut off my leg to take away the pain.”
We fought for ourselves for three years until things were good between us again. The wound has to heal. During that time I had exactly 100 therapy sessions of my own, I often raged in front of Marc, yelled, insulted him, because such a big injury is not easily forgotten with an apology. And he endured it. It took a while before I could forgive him and he could forgive himself. Both were important.
Today I am no longer afraid of anything in this respect. The fact that we survived this crisis has brought us even closer together. I have long since trusted Marc completely again. We got married after the drama, had a second child and are still glad that we made it.