On Love and Mawwiage

As an impressionable young college student who was still something of a baby Christian (I was saved at 14, so maybe by college I was a preschooler, ready to learn letter sounds?), I heard many a chapel speaker say confidently of marriage: it's about commitment, not feeling.

May I please tell you, ten years into a marriage my young college self didn't ever want to have, that marriage is about both feeling and commitment? After all, why does one commit in the first place? Does that reason not involve both head and heart? As I stood at the sink washing dishes, I mentally composed this blog post. I was delighted to find that my last post was on a similar topic, even though I wrote it almost a year ago. I feel that in our years of marriage,

 I have learned some things, both from watching others and from living with Andrew:

1) I had the privilege of spending time with Andrew's maternal grandparents while both were still living (his grandfather passed away a couple years ago). In his last years, Andrew's grandfather didn't remember many of his family members, even his own daughters. And as I watched Andrew's grandmother care for her husband, I was stricken with the idea that when we marry, we don't usually actually picture what "in sickness" may look like. But how beautiful it was to see one spouse care for another, especially in very difficult times. This, I think, is what marriage is about.

2) Feelings happen. Denying them or belittling them does nobody any good. In my own experience (full disclosure: I'm blue-green, but mostly blue), I cannot move past an emotional reaction until I acknowledge my feelings and figure out where they came from. Then and only then can I look at the facts. Sometimes, this means I clean the house or otherwise distract myself from deep, meaningful conversation with my husband for a couple of days - not to avoid a conversation or put my feelings in a box, but to sort the feelings from the situation before I say something in anger that I really don't want to say. My husband is human, as am I. I like him like he is, but sometimes the little things seem to outweigh my perception of who I know he is, so I find it helpful to step back and evaluate and reweigh those little things against the larger picture of who he is. Yes, that means feelings. No, it doesn't mean the feelings always win. This, I think, is what marriage is about.

3) Having children has changed the dynamics of our marriage, the amount of chores we share and how they are distributed, and sometimes the boys flat out zap all my energy, leaving me feeling less like a woman and more like a caregiver. This is when date nights help - not when they are done out of obligation, appointment, or habit, but when they are needed and appreciated and altogether more organic. And yes, Redbox and a bottle of wine after the kids go to bed counts as a date night. I've also found that I struggled with staying at home with the boys not because I didn't want to be there, but because I didn't want someone else's dogma deciding that doing so was my place as a woman. While becoming a mother has helped me to reach new levels of empathy and understand God's grace more deeply, it's been a challenge to my inner militant feminist. But thankfully, Andrew and I have never been the couple that puts on airs or roles for each other. We are who we are - known and accepted.

I don't know that my former impressionable college self would have agreed with some of my current thoughts on marriage. She probably would have thought they were thoroughly unromantic, and she'd be right. But she also didn't know anything about how man-woman relationships work (plus scientifically her brain wasn't finished leveling out).

If I could sit my younger self down, I would tell her how well-meaning those chapel speakers were, and that they probably didn't mean to imply that marriage is only about choice and commitment and therefore is an arbitrary force of will. What I think they meant to say is that college students away from home for the first time shouldn't necessarily assume that because they really really like each other that marriage is the only logical conclusion. It was for Andrew and me, by the way, but it isn't that way for every couple. Marriage should not be entered into without heaping amounts of prayer, reflection, maturity, and knowledge about each other. The feelings alone aren't enough to make it work when the kids have been crying all day, the checkbook is overdrawn, and the two of you can't agree on what to do with the tax refund you haven't even gotten yet.

C.S. Lewis said that “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” I would say marital love isn't only an affectionate feeling, but an ongoing desire to share every part of your life with your spouse, and to encourage him or her to be the best person possible, at whatever cost to onself.

And my younger self would roll her eyes and go to Taco Bell. But at least I would have tried.