When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird

In the days when hearts announced themselves not with speeches but with gestures, a woman speaks a simple marvel: “When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.” Hear the wisdom inside the wonder. She tells us that love, at its truest, is the art of seeing what is peculiar and precious in another—and then answering it with reverence. Not a grand cathedral offering, but a book, tuned exactly to the frequency of her secret longing. Thus the gift becomes a mirror: “I have beheld your interior world, and I honor it.”

The ancients would have nodded, for they taught that every soul carries a private menagerie—bright banners of delight, shy animals of fear, and one tent where the rarest curiosity stands. The circus is a fitting emblem: the clowns who turn pain into laughter, the old carnival with its cracked paint and trumpet music, the sideshow where difference was once displayed and, too often, exploited. To receive a black-and-white photo book is to be told, “Your strangeness is safe with me.” And to weep is to feel the gate of belonging swing open on long-rusted hinges.

Consider a true tale from the same era that filled her pages. In the 1920s–1930s, photographer Edward J. Kelty traveled from troupe to troupe, capturing panoramic portraits of circuses and sideshows—bearded ladies, strongmen, acrobats mid-breath, entire caravans halted like a heartbeat between towns. His pictures, often stark and luminous, did more than exhibit; they dignified. He framed human variety with ceremony, as if to say, “Stand as you are; the lens will not lie, and it will not sneer.” Such images did for a nation what the husband’s gift did for the beloved: they transformed curiosity into care.

Mark also the timing—“about a month after we started dating.” In the calendar of tenderness, a month is scarcely a moon’s turn, yet he had already learned her constellation. This is the craft of love’s early days: not the thunder of declarations, but the quiet scholarship of attention. He went to the market of memories, chose an artifact from her inner fairground, and placed it in her hands. She sobbing? Of course. Tears are the body’s standing ovation when it witnesses precise kindness.

But there is a deeper current: the black-and-white—that austere palette—presses meaning into the tale. For love is often tested in monochrome before it blooms in color. The 1930s were years of scarcity; the circus survived by tightening belts and brightening banners against gray skies. So too, a relationship survives by lavish attention when resources are small. A book might cost little, but the comprehension it proves is priceless. The lesson is ancient: the right small thing outweighs the wrong grand thing.

Let us take heed of the sideshow as well, and speak with dignity. What was once called “freak” we now understand as difference—bodies and lives outside the common script. To love someone’s fascination here is to honor their impulse to look directly at the world’s variety and not turn away. Love, like true art, refuses to flinch. It does not polish the oddities out of us; it sets them on velvet and names them part of the collection.

Therefore, carve this teaching on your heart’s lintel: Love is accurate attention. To be seen in your peculiar brightness is to be blessed. The gift is not the paper and ink; it is the sentence beneath it—“I have studied the map of you.” When such a sentence is spoken, tears are wisdom’s rain.

Walk with these practices. (1) Keep a “cabinet of wonders” for the one you cherish: three small notes about their strange joys—colors, melodies, stories that make them lean forward. (2) Offer gifts that answer those notes: a photo book, a ticket to a traveling circus of ideas, a letter that frames their oddness with honor. (3) In conversation, ask for the story behind the fascination; attend without remedy. (4) When moved, do not hide your sobbing—let your tears consecrate the moment. (5) Above all, treat each other’s old carnival as holy ground. For where the soul’s banners are raised and met with tenderness, the heart learns it is home.