I have started watching House MD on Netflix, it is an interesting show. This cantankerous doctor with a back story, that has wounded him, is a brilliant diagnostician. He is like the Sherlock Holms of doctors. I have noticed two things one he is constantly trying to decipher all the symptoms and/or causes seeking to almost get them out of the way to get to the root cause. The other thing he has said often is everyone lies.
As I look back at the marriage that I shared with my ex before the last year, I think we had good things and bad things going on..like every marriage. But if I look at it from here, at a distance, I notice that we had a broken defense system. What does that mean? It means we never really figured out how to get through the bad stuff together. So when they came we reacted to them, often times individually. Yet, we didn't have the ability to walk through them together. To use the metaphor here, our body had no real immune system. So when the little crummy things of life happened bumps, bruises, illness we would wipe some salve on it or take a pill and then move on. Which at first is not that big of a deal. But eventually something big happens and the anemic, battered body that you bring to the table when something big happens cannot get through it.
Okay let's climb out of the metaphor before I get too lost in it. We never really learned how to communicate, we surely never learned how to conflict. Part of that stemmed back to issues we brought to the table individually. Our conflict styles did not match up, we would have needed to work very hard and extremely intentionally to accomplish healthy conflict. We didn't do that.
We never took the time to really figure what we loved to do together. We knew what we loved to do individually and sometimes we would include the other on our terms. But we never spent enough time or energy figuring out the things that would create an environment of health as a regularly communicating team outside of the ordinary daily details or conflict.
I think we were so focused on growing up ourselves and raising our daughters that we stopped even thinking about growing our relationship.
It's funny when we started dating we were headed in the right direction. We didn't even kiss for months because we knew that this gets in the way of communicating and we wanted to focus on getting to know eachother not just focus on the next time we were going to kiss. We prayed together, trying to include the other in our intimate relationships with God. We read devo's and books commenting on the things that stood out to us. We spent much of our time in groups, so we intentionally set apart a night a week where we could be alone on a date just us. In my mind the way we began was on a pretty solid foundation. We even attempted to do this when we were first married, but careers, expectations from family, friends, and probably most importantly the unmet ones from each other began to pile up between us.
To slip back into the metaphor, our main arteries to the heart of our marriage began to clog. It was subtle at first, then a couple of big blockages landed infertility and unmet financial obligation. In some way we knew these things were there, that they were slowly killing us, but as long as we didn't "mess" around with them we were "okay".
So we had "lots" of symptoms, but what was the root cause. Because the truth is we are both lovely, intelligent, hard working, caring, people. We have supportive families who love us and loved our spouses, they aren't perfect but humans never are. We share many stories, memories, bonds, got through infertility to have two beautiful daughters, worked hard in our careers and stood out among our peers. We even love each other.
Love- well that is an interesting thing. Now we may be on to something. There is a piece of scripture from the message that goes like this: The eyes are the windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty eyes in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have. This is not a scripture about marriage but it applies so well here. We choose over and over again to live squinty-eyed, greedy to put it bluntly. It wasn't that we didn't love each other, the problem was we loved ourselves more.
The root problem was we were human. We avoided awkward situations and uncomfortable conversations....we were selfish... in the end that's what tore us apart. It wasn't the symptoms though there were many. We forgot to open our eyes wide in wonder and belief that this other person was more important than we were and that they were worth sacrificing our own self love for any day of the week. The funny thing is that didn't have to kill us, to be honest it still doesn't. But we will probably carry on making the same mistakes and falling prey to the same symptoms again and again. I believe that we could fix us, the us that we never gave a fair shot, the us God put together to make us more whole with Him, the us that loves our daughters to infinity. But we won't.
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