On Tuesday night, Dan and I went on a double date with our friends Tom and Lindsey to a magical little agriturismo tucked away in the Umbrian hills. As with most meals here, the combination of gorgeous food and wine led to the kind of eager, overlapping conversation that Italians are famous for. And somewhere between the Sagrantino gnocchi and the profiterole, I found myself telling our love story—the well-worn details of meeting and connecting and promising.
It struck me later, as we walked through herb gardens back to the car, that this was the first time I had recounted our romantic history without feeling defensive. See, Dan and I got engaged only two months into dating, and I often felt like I had to justify our relationship to others, lay it out in neat mathematical terms so they would approve. It wasn’t easy. We went to a small Christian university where students were concerned with finding the Right Person to marry. Ironically, the divorce rate among our former classmates is higher than average, but I suppose it makes sense—a lot of Mr. and Mrs. Perfects showed themselves to be less-than-perfect after the wedding, and oops! Destiny must have loaded the wrong program. Ctrl + Alt + Delete, UndoMarriage, Restart.
I wish someone—maybe Dr. Phil?—would have sat the lot of us confused college students down and said, “Listen. Life is not a fairytale. There is not one custom-made person floating around somewhere in the world with your future happiness in his hands. Prince Charming? Is gay. So stop worrying about perfection and marry someone who helps you bloom into a better, brighter self. Choose someone you can laugh with and cry with and charge into the future with, and then be prepared to work hard for your relationship ‘til death do you part.”
I never knew what people meant when they told me, “You’ll know which one is The One.” No divine decree conked me on the head when I met Dan, and I often doubted our relationship simply because no fairy godmother was singing “bibbidee-bobbidee-boo” at us. However, I adored him. We could walk comfortably through each other’s minds, and our personalities clicked from the start. More than all, we wanted the same things in life, and our future together shone with delighted promise. I hated having to explain our relationship to cynical friends. They were looking for complicated magic—a mile-long wish list being checked off by one person—whereas what we had was simple: We loved each other, and we were willing to put our lives’ efforts into caring for that love.
I don’t often blog about marriage because I feel like there are fine lines between the honest and the pretentious (“We have it all figured out”), the sugar-coated (“Our marriage is a 24-7 makeoutfest!”), and the complaining (“My husband is a horrible person who would rather see me writhe in agony than put his dirty socks in the laundry basket”*). And while parenting is often a one-sided struggle, marriage is a very intimate haven requiring respect and discretion. Not open for public viewing
At the same time, I’m always encouraged to hear about other couples learning how to love each other through life’s inevitable storms and whirlpools and doldrums. Also, I can’t help wondering if there’s some other woman out there wondering if she’s chosen the right husband, terrified that any argument could lead to divorce. So this is what (nearly) five years of marriage have taught me:
Making time to talk about little things is hard.
Making time to talk about big things is harder.
Making time (and finding courage) to talk about the huge and ugly things, the ones you really don’t want to bring up, the ones that make you scared or weepy or furious, is incredibly hard,
BUT
Those conversations are the ones that propel a relationship forward, and if you can get yourself to say the unsayable, to work slowly and painfully through problems together, and maybe even to hug in the middle of a fight, you’ll delve deeper into the kind of love that far transcends checklists and fairy godmothers.
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* For the record, my husband always puts his socks in the laundry, no writhing required. I like him, yes I do.
