In our best, gutsiest, most honest moments of the last year, we said things to each other that we never imagined saying out loud to anyone, things we were afraid of, things we couldn't bear. And those ugly honest confessions bloomed into a new intimacy, a new protectiveness, a new promise to walk together, and better than before. The connectedness of marriage is almost like being a twin, knowing someone's voice and hands and language as well as you know your own, and the honesty of it, right at the core, when you get to the core, is stunning.
Marriage is more than a contract, with partners and stipulations and if you, then I arrangements. It's a messy, beautiful, living, breathing thing, full of dreams and history and patterns and memories, and this is the deal: you can make your point all day long, and you can even be right about your point, but if you stop listening, if you stop really hearing and seeing that other person, something fundamental will be lost. You can try to push and pull all you want, hoping for change. But more often than not, if you do that, I think you'll find two people bruised and exhausted, but not really changed.
So on our eighth anniversary, we're shoring up the distance we created and working hard to recapture the good things that have been there all along. We're working on loving each other just as we are right now: unfinished, unvarnished, in the middle of all the mess, in some ways really different from each other, and in some ways very similar. This year we've decided to lay off each other, to trust that life and God and pain will instruct us when necessary. We're committed to helping each other through those moments, instead of pouring salt in raw wounds and pushing on tender spots, our immaturity disguised as altruistic desire for the other to grow.
In some moments during the last season, we wanted the other to grow because it would have suited our needs better, and that's not nearly good enough a reason. We tried to teach each other lessons that we realized after the fact weren't ours to teach. Life will teach us things, and there are times for marriage to teach us, but there are also times for marriage to be a safe landing spot when life is instructing us rather brutally.
In the space that's been created now that we've let a few things go, we're finding all sorts of beautiful things blooming into life once again—the reasons we fell in love, the things we used to laugh about that stopped being funny for a while and are now, blessedly, funny again.
Excerpted from
Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way.
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