“How often are you happy,
Charlotte?”
Carrie and Miranda, heartbroken and
disillusioned by their too-fallibly human men, ask this question of their other
married friend in the Sex and the City
movie.
“Every day,” she answers, almost
guiltily, as if she has no right to her happiness in the face of her friends’ difficulties.
“Not all the time every day,” she hastily
amends, “but—every day.”
How important is your happiness
anyway?
So first there was one Seth Adam Smith's blog that went viral. Then there was this rebuttal (one of several).
Then there was Very Angry Anti-Liberal Guy's rebuttal to the rebuttal (one of
several). My friend Angie even wrote her own thoughtful take, and now I’m writing mine. The
topic of the week, evidently, is marriage; and not just marriage, but conclusively
deciding what marriage is and who it is for. And we are all up in arms.
But can we put down our guns for a minute? It seems like everyone wants to get the
last word, to lay the smack down. Write THE “that’s
what marriage is all about, Charlie Brown” blog. I admit, my egotistical
impulse as I considered writing this was to do the same. But I will resist that
desire because the more I think about it, the more I realize nobody has the last word on marriage.
There are as many kinds of marriages and partnerships as there are people, and
we can only see other people’s marriages through the glass of our own picture
windows. There is value in listening to (or reading) experiences completely unlike our own. Sure, we react to other people’s reflections on marriage based on those
windows, and we react strongly. But maybe we should try to step back, and realize
that others’ journeys are not about us. I know that’s what I had to do after reading
Seth’s blog. Just because I got involved in a marriage that was a disaster precisely because I completely discounted my own importance does not invalidate this man's experience and journey.
I may still strongly disagree with the way he expressed some things, because I find them personally hurtful and can see he doesn't have the experience to validate his words, but his story is not mine, it is his own. As are all of ours.
I know I’ve looked at some of my
friends’ marriages from my little window, completely aghast at what seems to be their
reality; yet they profess absolute contentment. I know that I could never live with their kind of
marriage, but I’ve come to realize how little that matters. I am not them, and
they are not me.
On the flip side, I’ve been
blindsided by news of a breakup or secret trouble between two people I’d
thought were “perfect for each other”. Which shows what I know; and that’s not
much.
Whether you’ve been together a
month, a lifetime, or somewhere in between, there is one constant: marriage,
just like life, is always an uncertainty.
We don’t even know the full truth
about our own marriages. There was a time in his former marriage when my now husband
routinely claimed (and fully believed) that nobody had a better, stronger marriage
than him.
And I remember telling people the story of how I got together with my
first husband, and how romantic they all thought it was. “When you know, you
know,” I would tell them knowingly, truly believing I knew.
I also remember years
ago overhearing a friend of mine (who ultimately went through a divorce) having
a heart-to-heart with another married friend of hers, both agreeing that
divorce was “simply not an option” for either of them.
When we’re in the midst of
something, we just can’t see the full truth. Try to paint a landscape while
you’re standing in the middle of it.
I think probably that even if you
do stay happily together for decades, only perspective gives you the gift of fully
understanding, just like anything else in life, the various ups and downs in
your marriage.
So if you are married or in a
long-term committed relationship, you know that as my friend Myriam says (or
her mom says. Or her mom’s mom says?): every
marriage is a black box. Every married/committed person (I think) has many
moments with their spouse where they look at each other and say “Can you even
imagine what our (friends/parents/siblings/whoever) would say if they could
see/hear this right now?” and burst out laughing. Then there are the not so
funny bits that nobody knows or would ever guess, as well.
Marriage is full of quirks and shadowy
corners, secret gears and scotch-tape, worn mechanisms that keep it ticking,
for better or for worse. Nobody can fully see inside that box except the two
people who built it. And when it breaks, they are the only ones who will ever
be capable of fully understanding why, and even then they may opt out of
thinking about it enough to arrive at that point.
So if you haven’t been through a
divorce, but you have watched from the sidelines, picking teams and deciding
who’s a victim and who’s the “Wal-Mart philosophy” villain—well, I don’t expect
to change your mind. Judgers gonna judge.
But to look at someone else’s
divorce and decree with smug disgust that this or that partner was “selfish”
and just looking for someone who makes them transiently “happy” –that is the
epitome of injustice.
Sure, people make mistakes, go about
doing the right thing the wrong way, communicate poorly, behave immaturely and
irrationally. Sometimes when a relationship goes awry, these things are very
evident. But having lived through plenty of divorce in my family life, I know
that in the vast majority of cases divorce is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching,
mega-painful, serious business. Years
of therapy, tears, self-examination, and/or deliberation often ensue
beforehand. (Maybe there are people who get divorced because of very simplistic
reasons; I just don’t know any of them personally.)
So next time you are tempted, like Really
Angry Guy, to dismiss 50% of the population as selfish and looking for instant
gratification, please think again. I also intensely resent the implication that
I did not “choose wisely” because I am divorced. I chose as wisely as I could
with the experience and resources available to me at that point in my life. Before
deciding about other people’s marriages, consider the reality that you do not
and never will have all the pieces of the puzzle.
Nor is the puzzle any of your
business, really. Mind your own marriage. Mind your own life. Life is a school,
and God (or the Universe, if you prefer) deliberately gave you control over
only one student: yourself.
Which brings me to my thoughts on serving others while caring for oneself.
Ironically, it seems the crowd that thinks they are so important as to have the power to make judgments about the marriages and divorces of those around
them are the same ones crowing about how great it is that they have made themselves completely unimportant in the scheme of their own family lives. Bewildering, no?
Here’s the truth as I see it from
my own picture window: caring for each other is important. Learning to give up
your selfish behavior and patterns, your childish emotional reactions, and
desires to achieve your own goals before all else is part and parcel of the
marriage deal.
But if you aren’t being honest with
yourself about what you need (which is different from what you want, as we all teach our toddlers), if
you aren’t constantly on a journey to increase your self-understanding—you
aren’t going to be able to truly give anyone else what they need. You aren’t
going to be able to truly understand someone else the way we all yearn to be
understood.
Those of us who protested the
original blog post were not trying to attack poor Seth; we were simply pointing out the uncomfortable reality that unsurprisingly,
many deny: the hardest work you have to do in life is dealing with your own self, as you
are.
As I was pondering people’s incredibly
defensive reactions to the current crop of blogs on this topic, Matt and I
asked each other: Do you feel like you have to sacrifice a lot for me? Do you
feel like our marriage is really hard? Do you feel like this marriage is not
about you?
At first I said no, I really don’t.
I feel like I sacrifice nothing. I feel like my marriage is a joy and a
blessing. Hearing Matt’s voice when I don’t expect it still makes my heart jump
into my throat. Sometimes I watch him sleep and cry from the sheer force of how
much I love him.
Frankly, it made me a little worried. Was it bad, I asked him,
that I felt that way? Did it mean I was doing something wrong?
But then he pointed out to me how
ironic my answers were:
Did I not subject myself to an
incredible amount of judgment, much of it extremely harsh and from people I
cared about very much, to be with him?
Did I not leave my family, friends,
and the children who occupy a very large place in my heart in California in order
to be an eternally foreign northerner in Mississippi?
Did I not willingly give up the joy
of being the first woman to make my beloved a father? Did I not know that I may
never be able to equal that gift, and that living with that reality may break
my heart a little bit every day?
And do I not willingly sacrifice
half of our “carefree newlywed” life to do the emotionally taxing work of navigating my step-parenting role with his son?
Do I not give up little luxuries,
on a daily basis, for the sake of an innocent child though I had no part in bringing him into this world?
Do we not have tense and sometimes
painful discussions about finances, family, where to spend holidays?
Do we not fight sometimes?
Do we not have ongoing points of
unresolved tension that rear their ugly heads when they are the least welcome?
Of course I did, I do, and we do.
I guess it just comes down to
perspective. So I feel like the challenges of this marriage are nothing, are pure joy. I’m not trying to make myself sound
super-awesome in comparison to everybody else; I’m trying to make it clear that
what I have is pure gold--in comparison
to what I had before: a bogged down, miserable existence of trying to be the
oxygen for a man, my best friend, who didn’t know how to breathe on his own.
Believing I could, and should, be that loving sustenance. Sure, I felt stuck, depressed, sad, lonely,
frustrated, overwhelmed. But hey, it wasn’t about me, right? I had married him in front of
God and those witnesses, and it was my responsibility to make it work. To force
it to work. To find the way.
Had I read Seth’s blog at that
point in my life, I very easily could have taken it dangerously to heart. I
might have remembered my own trepidation before my own wedding, and found
comfort in his father’s advice: it didn’t matter that I was uncertain about the
marriage, because it wasn’t about me. Our families and friends wanted us
together, he was great with kids, he wanted me with him, and that, apparently, should suffice.
But the reality was I did my ex-husband no favors by making it
all about him. The work he needed to do the most, he could never do with me
by his side. The work I needed to do could not be done with him in my life,
either. (I would elaborate for clarity, but I respect him too much to do so.) We
tearfully recognized this two years ago today and hugged each other goodbye.
After signing divorce papers 6 months later we hugged again, briefly paying
homage to the good parts of our marriage. He’s a good man and I wish nothing but
good things for him, and I hope he wishes the same for me.
So don’t tell me I have a “Wal-Mart
philosophy” and “gave up when I decided I wanted a new one”. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Sometimes something is so broken, it truly can’t be
fixed, no matter what you do. But as the saying goes, you live, you learn. That
marriage wasn’t a failure, because it taught me the most important lessons I’ve
learned in my life to date.
When I first saw the Sex and the City movie, it was at a very
difficult point in that first marriage. I look back and see it as the beginning
of the end—a process that took three agonizing years.
When I heard Charlotte’s words, in
that scene I quoted above, I immediately felt an empty hollowness in my chest.
Was it really supposed to be like that? I wondered. Could you really be in a
marriage with so much love that it brought you joy every day? I resented the implication.
Happiness, I thought, was
ephemeral. Nice when it came along, but never lasting more than a day, maximum,
at a time. Feeling “happiness” was not what life was meant to be about. (I
still believe that, by the way.)
Now I can see that I confused that
happy emotion with a happy state of
being, which I never had in that marriage—why? Because it was never about me.
And that crushed my soul.
We do matter in our own marriages. Yes,
we do deserve some things as (I believe) children of God created to love and be
loved. We all deserve to be with
someone we love, someone we want to
be married to and/or spend our lives with, someone who helps us grow rather
than holds us back; whatever that looks like for each one of us. Almost
everyone I know who ended up divorced got married too young, before they knew
who they really were and what they needed, myself included. So I’ll say this:
what we do NOT deserve is to punish ourselves for a lifetime because we made
the wrong decision for forever when we were 23.
If, like I did, we make the mistake
of ignoring our Selves, that is the worst disservice to those we claim to love.
Even on days like yesterday, when my
stepson wet the bed and is in a tantrum-ish mood, the cat peed on the floor, the
other cat might have worms, the laundry isn’t doing itself, obligations
continue to be unfulfilled, the house is an unmitigated disaster, I have PMS
(which means, obviously, I am again Not Pregnant, Queen of the One-Line Test), fear
and stress over money and work hours demands instant attention, I keep spilling
everything from my soup to the contents of my purse, and crying over nothing—even
on these days when I feel anything
but happy, I am happy.
I am happy because when I ask my
husband to come back from dropping off his son to help me with dinner (a trial
run for our Thanksgiving food, due on his parents’ table where I promised it at
six, the complexity of which was overwhelming me in my hellishly hot kitchen)
and he says he can’t because he has to go back to work, and I’m so frustrated
I’m about to cry (again) he stops walking out the door, turns around, and wraps
his arms around me tight. I turn to kiss him and am thankful that in the midst
of the chaos, this is my life now. I did this. I brought this to myself by
loving my ex-husband in the way he needed to be loved, hard as it was, and by
letting myself understand that I matter.
I have this man who is in love with
me, who I am in love with, no matter what. It fills my heart to bursting, even if
I do have to chop my own garlic while the onions burn and he has to go back to
work so he can provide for all of us as best he can, which we both know still
won’t be enough to make ends meet.
“Thank you,” I whisper to him.
“Thank you for never making marriage feel like work. Even when it is.”
And he kisses me again (and I
almost stab him forgetting there’s a knife in my hand) and now I know that’s the kind of happy Charlotte was
talking about all along.
But this isn’t the last word. I
know very well that my experience and my life is NOT the be-all end-all, and I
am not the pinnacle of wisdom and brilliance. But I’m appreciating this
conversation and learning much of value from it. I look forward to reading more
contributions and hope it continues for awhile.
Thank you for caring enough to read
what I have to say.
(Oh, also, this quote, because it’s
simple and true. “Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex.
Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational." ~Hugh Mackay)
