The winter day was cool and sunny, the beer dark and cold, the cocktail sauce on the cold shrimp hot with horseradish. My friend and I were passing a blissful afternoon on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall, when she said something that struck me to the core.

She was speaking of her husband. “After all these years together, after all that man’s put up with from me, he still loves me. I find that amazing.”

Actually, I think she said it more lyrically than that, but I’ve been wracking my brain for several minutes for the exact phrasing and screw it, that’s to the best of my recollection.

Then she added, “That’s why I’ll allow things like the 8-foot mounted swordfish over the bed.”

I throw that in apart from her first quote because it just doesn’t quite jibe with the beauty of that initial phrase. But I throw it in anyway because it’s damn funny, and makes a point of its own.

But back to that word: Amazement. It could be used to describe anything awe-inspiring, from a horrible accident to a football game won in the last few seconds of overtime. But when my friend said it, it sounded like neither of those things. It sounded like something holy, like a miracle.

Her words struck me, too, as amazing. And incredibly cheering.

For it seems to me love should be amazing, an idea I have sometimes feared is naive, based on my own inexperience. To hear someone so deep into a relationship say that it exists sends a shivers down the spine. I suspect this is one of those key elusive elements found among solidly bonded couples.

You could say it points to a sense of insecurity. But I think not. I think it indicates a sense of reverence for this most transcendent of emotions. For love, which sees all and enfolds it all into one bear hug of an embrace.

It’s the same shiver of recognition and deep yearning I feel at hearing Alanis Morissette’s “Everything.” This idea, this grand hope, brings me near tears every time I play it.

You see everything, you see every part
You see all my light and you love my dark
You dig everything of which I'm ashamed
There's not anything to which you can’t relate
And you’re still here

My sense is that my last relationship, already strained by a distance of several states, ended almost two years into it when he saw me in a clinical depression. Knowing about the bipolar disorder was one thing, dealing with it quite another. I’ll never know for sure because after that, he simply stopped calling, and changed his phone number.

I’m left with the idea, nearly a conviction, that something that is part of me, a factor I don’t think I can change, was unacceptable to him. So ugly that he ran. So now I wonder, next time a relationship turns serious, what will happen when I reveal my not-so-pretty history, my unpredictable disorder? What will happen, too, when I expose the character flaws that can’t be attributed or blamed on bipolar disorder?

Wouldn’t it be amazing if he loved me anyway?

Even though I sometimes feel alone in this, I know I’m standing hip-to-hip in a cavernous room full of like-minded people. Whether single or part of a couple, we are all far too aware of our flaws, all far too unaware of how amazing we each are, how deserving of love.

I sometimes have a hard time picturing that all-encompassing variety of love. But last weekend I saw it, written like a poem on my friend’s face.

It was, quite simply, amazing.