Pulling Back the Curtain on Love and Marriage

It is going to be a stormy day here in Fayetteville, NC, so it is the perfect time for me to write to you, Constant Reader. (Ha. That makes me sound like Stephen King...he always calls us "Constant Reader"..) My topic for the day is going to be love. I was inspired by two things this week. First I was inspired by a quote someone posted on Facebook (ignore any grammar and subject/verb agreement errors):

                       The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly

                       you'll see their flaws. That's just the way it is. That is way marriages fail,

                       why children are abandoned, why friendships don't last. You might think

                       you love someone until you see they way they act when they're out of

                       money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness sake. Love is something

                       different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in 

                       spite of their filthy hearts. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love

                       is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it's seeing the darkness in another

                       person and defying the impulse to jump ship. 

And second, I was inspired by a conversation I had at CrossFit when the girls found out how long I had been married. They asked me why I thought some people lasted and others didn't. It was shocking how closely my answer actually  paralleled the above quote without me even reading it. 

I guess I always assumed (we know what that means) that everyone knew that real love isn't an emotion but is an action. Clearly that isn't the case. I think society has been wooed by some fairy tale of what "love" is...they have confused "falling in love" with loving. Falling in love is a temporary thing that involves WAAAYYY too much adrenalin for a person's body to sustain forever. Just like falling off a cliff, the "falling" will eventually end....and it will end with the same huge THUD! as the cliff if you don't know the end is coming. And that isn't a bad thing. You know that expression about when one thing ends, another begins? Same here. Falling in love changes into something so much deeper, Truly loving is such a profound thing, but it doesn't just happen. It requires WORK. You are going to wake up some days, roll over, see the person on the other side of the bed, resplendent with morning breath, bedhead, and a cranky attitude and think, "I don't like him/her much today." And that's OK. You guys are going to fight, argue, whatever you choose to call it to make yourself feel better. You are going to get mad. But guess what? It passes. If you really love each other, it passes. If your attitude is, "We work it out," then you work it out. You listen to each other. You try to walk in each other's shoes. You compromise. You accept that the other person is going to have little foibles and habits that annoy...so do you! :) 

Let me tell you one of my famous secrets....the "falling in love" isn't going to be what helps get you through when your spouse is really sick and needs you to hold her hair while she vomits, or, God forbid, clean him up when he is bedridden. "Falling in love" isn't going to keep you together if you have a tragedy. "Falling in love" isn't going to keep you together if one of you gains 100 pounds or loses your job. Love really is hard. Love really takes effort and sometimes you are going to wonder if it is worth it. It IS. But BOTH of you have to believe that. And BOTH of you have to work. The work isn't always going to be 50-50 though, and you need to accept that too. That isn't how it works. Some days is will be, but other days it might be 70-30 or even 90-10...that may be all your spouse has to give that day. But over the course of a lifetime together it will balance out if the commitment is there. 

This isn't a lecture from the ivory tower. I know what I am talking about because I have been in the trenches. My marriage almost fell apart. But my husband and I managed to pull it out of the fire because we decided that it was worth fighting for. Our marriage is the most valuable treasure I have. My husband doesn't COMPLETE me, I am a complete person by myself. See, that "you complete me" thing was thrust on us by Jerry McGuire, but if you think about it, you will realize how stupidly dependent (not romantic) that really sounds. But without him in my life, I would lose my first line of defense....my defender, my confidant, my personal comedian, my most trusted advisor, and the human with whom I have the most intimate relationship. Life would be pretty colorless. I will do whatever is necessary to NEVER find out what it is like to be without him in my life. 

I'm not trying to say that there still wouldn't be reasons that marriages fail. Stuff happens. But all in all, I think people just throw in the towel as soon as something looks broken. We have become a society of people who don't know how to repair things, we just buy new stuff. But even new stuff comes with its own problems. If it is REALLY love, it is worth fighting for.