How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

I'm home sick with a nasty cold, trolling the Net and perusing old blog entries. I realize I've hardly written about the husband, except in passing and to note that he is a true arbiter of fashion here in Sweden.

Of course, there's nothing ickier than reading about requited love or happy marriages - or happy families, for that matter; as Tolstoy said, all happy families are alike, although I'd be willing to take that one on sometime.

No one wants to hear that I still marvel over my husband after three years (I admit, that isn't very long - I was 13 years with the ex), I marvel at his beauty, all his handsome Mediterranean features, those perfect lips and striking green eyes, the dark hair on his arms and his small hands. I love that he is wise and kind and thoughtful and yet a perfectionist, that he loves things of beauty himself - he has to in his business - and yet he's never taken in merely by the surface of things.

Otherwise he wouldn't be with me, an extremely average-looking person who is eight years older, who can't buy clothes unless he's with me, who is sloppier (but our apartment is spic and span, if you ignore the hall which is filthy from workmen, and the fine coating of dust in the kitchen, also courtesy of the workmen - it's mostly my desk at work that's a mess), who is a good 10 kilos more than when we met at a club in Barcelona when he was on vacation and I was living there (well, I was too skinny then anyway, but not 10 kilos too skinny).

And thank god he looks beyond the surface because I am wildly in love with him.

The Swedish word for the day is kärlek. It means, of course, love.

-by Francis S., hopeless sentimental