Hubby is always posting adorable pics of us with lavish words of love for me in his facebook posts. People comment, usually exclaiming over what a perfect couple we are and how Hubby certainly found the perfect mate. It’s very affirming to be seen in such a positive light. I’m kinda glad facebook was not an option for us right after we first got married. Posts would have been much different back then.
Truth is, our relationship now is fabulous. I adore him and miss him terribly when we are apart. He brings me flowers. He buys me stuff. This used to be a source of contention between us because it meant he spent money. Money sucks. the life right out of you. Sigh. I digress.
What gets me is the comments like, “Wish I could find someone that special.” I laugh when I read these things because, you know the saying about great lawns on the other side of the fence . . . having more fertilizer? Yeah. There’s a lot of that stuff all over our relationship.
So what’s the difference? How did we get “true love” and other people are so dissatisfied, frustrated? You aren’t going to like the answer. Like The Princess Bride, there’s hard work involved, pits of dispair, fire swamps, thieves’ forests and six fingered men. Well, obviously not exactly those things, but as Westley tells Buttercup, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” And it doesn’t help that we each come pre-broken.
In our first year of marriage I think I wore thin the statement, “Well, we’ve been doing it that way in our house for my whole life and no one’s died yet!” Hubby was never impressed. I had learned bad habits and skewed ways of looking at the world and so had hubby, and our union’s happiness began to wane right out of the gate.
Women, let me be clear here, hubby’s have a fairly simple agenda. I’ll explain by explaining – “If we knew what men were thinking, we’d never stop slapping them.” It’s just the way they’re wired. So if you’re not fulfilling that need – which is what they thought the license was buying them – then all your other problems are magnified and you’ll never get them to understand your point of view. It’s being spoken from behind a pair of boobs. So they’re constantly reminded as you speak that they’re not getting any. Words are useless against such in depth programming.
That said, life itself is brutal. And, as I mentioned briefly above, usually involves the lack of money. It also involves who we are chemically. Who we are as a conglomerate of all our experiences. Hidden experiences, not shared with your spouse, can be devastating, and you don’t even know that as the root cause of your pain.
We had all of this as we started our journey. We should never have survived. As our country’s divorce rate indicates, survival is rare, and doesn’t always involve love. We don’t come “pre-true-loved.” We earn it.
Taking my cues from the source, which dating back before the beginning of time, is the One True God: He decided to love us. He made a commitment to rescue us – and not lightly, if you recall the tears in the garden, knowing full well they would torture him, spit on him, make fun of him and then brutally murder him. He could have decided right then that we were not worth it – and who could blame him? From our own perspective we aren’t. But He chose to deem us worthy.
Yes, I’m using words like “decide” and “choose” that no one associates with True Love. Love’s a feeling, right? A Disney moment, ending in “happily ever after.” Right? Insert buzzer noise here. Totally false. Not true.
It took years, okay decades, for me to discover my hidden experience had hindered my ability to love. It took years for us to discover I had a disease that made me depressed and stole all my energy. It took a couple of years of “That’s unacceptable behavior,” for one of us to decide to try responding to the family differently. And it will take forever probably for some of the voices we grew up with to dissipate and no longer skew how we view our decisions on bad days, when old man winter just won’t quit, and the bills are piling up.
If Hubby had given up on me, and, yes, in despair at one point, I gave him that option, we would never have worked our way through all the dross to find the beauty in each other, in ourselves and enjoy each other so much now.
I enjoy our “True Love” posts. They are hard earned and longsuffered through to and deserve a bit of credit. At each juncture (and by juncture I mean, screaming fits, freezing the other out bits, having to admit we’re wrong, and other painful encounters) we made a choice. We chose to believe that our Creator knew better than us, and that obedience to His Word would be blessed. It didn’t happen overnight. And He heard a lot of complaining about it for a lot of years while He patiently fashioned the circumstances around our ability to “get it.” And when we didn’t think we could go on, we clung to Him in desperation and He gave us the strength to endure.
Yes, True Love endures. Hopes all things. Believes all things. Forgives all things. True Love is the coolest. And I count myself lucky to have survived this far – I’m sure in a few years I’ll look back and chuckle at how “arrived” I thought I was now and how much cooler True Love has become. Because that’s how True Love works. It just keeps getting better and better and better – and remember how that lawn got greener . . . It won’t get better because things are easier now or we’re nicer people now. No. It will get better because at each point in time when things get tough (just about every minute at the present time) we will choose to take one more step, forgive one more time, endure one more moment. Doesn’t sound sexy, but, trust me, it is – (insert silly goofy grin here) very, very sexy! : )
