My wife and I recently watched the movie “Love Comes Softly,” starring Katherine Heigl in her days before “Gray’s Anatomy” and “Knocked Up.” Also starring Dale Midkiff and a delightful little girl named Skye McCole Baitusiak, “Love Comes Softly” was made several years ago for the Hallmark cable channel, but since that is not one of the channels my wife and I receive, we viewed in on a DVD from Netflix.

If you are looking for a peachy clean, spiritually uplifting love story, then I highly recommend “Love Comes Softly.” However, as we approach another Valentine’s Day, I don’t really want to write about the movie itself. Instead, I want to write about its title.

In the movie, Katherine Heigl is a newlywed who had come West with her new husband to start a life on the prairie. However, her husband is thrown from his horse and killed soon after their arrival. Thus, Heigl is a young widow with no means of supporting herself, and the next wagon train east would not be departing until spring.

Midkiff is a widower whose wife has left him with a little girl. He makes a deal with Heigl’s character: He agrees to marry and support her in exchange for Heigl helping raise his daughter and helping him with the farm chores. When the next wagon train heads East in the spring, he says he will pay her passage on it if she wants to leave. Meanwhile, the couple sleep in separate quarters, making no attempt to consumate the marriage.

The point of the movie is this: Sometime people meet and immediately fall head over heels in love. But other times strangers who don’t even particularly like each other at first, over time learn to like and then eventually love one another. Theirs is a love that comes softly.

When my wife and I first met each other, we both fell hard — really hard. And quickly. By the end of the first week, we both knew we had found our soul mate. We just simply clicked, as if God had intended for us to be together.

But let’s be honest: That kind of passionate love cannot sustain a marriage of more than 30 years. At some point the love that comes softly replaces the head-over-heels love.

Well, maybe replace is not the right word. My wife and I still have our moments of real passion, but we also have reached a comfort zone in our marriage where we are every bit as much best friends as we are lovers.

We know each other better than anyone else knows us. We have learned to cherish and build on each other’s strengths and overlook our faults.

Without saying a word, we often know what the other is thinking. We have done some shared chores — making the bed, washing the dishes — so often, that we often do them without talking to one another.

On our many trips to Nebraska, we sometimes go for several hours without talking, but that doesn’t mean we’re mad or bored with one another. It simply means we’re comfortable with one another and have nothing of importance to say.

As I spend this Valentine’s Day with my wife of more than three decades, I will be celebrating not only the love that came hard in those first weeks after we met, but also the love that came softly in the years since then. It’s that “soft” love that makes my lover my best friend.

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2649.