A fairly terrible story (Will poss think of better title later)

Well I’ve just read a fairly terrible story which got me thinking…a woman was suddenly ditched by her boyfriend, out of the blue, after ten years together. They were high-school sweethearts and before being ditched she was sure that she wanted to marry him.  Which makes me wonder, would she have preferred it if they had at least gotten married before he ditched her, so that she could say “Well at least we were married”?  Does having an ex-husband grant you a higher status than merely having an ex-boyfriend? Personally, I would definitely prefer to have split with someone before marriage, because marriages are so binding in the eyes of God.  But not everyone thinks like me – not even all Christians! What makes this story terrible of course, is that she wasted ten years of her life in this relationship which was ultimately ended, just like that, for no apparently good reason, when she could have been investing those ten years in a more viable relationship. If you are ultimately going to ditch someone, why waste ten good years of their life, and yours?! Thankfully for her, either way, her story has a relatively happy ending in that she has found another partner.

You know, people might think that I am overthinking this whole marriage thing with my constant articles, examining things to the nth degree. However, this is the value of supposed “overthinking” – coming to a place where you are confident in your mind that you know what you want. And you have thought about stuff, and considered various possibilities. This blog is me doing the work to understand myself and understand marriage and understand what I want.  Dear Lord, please give me a fellow “overthinker”, someone who has also done the necessary work to understand himself, and life, and marriage, ad nauseam if necessary!

(This ties in with a blog post idea that occurred to me that I mentioned on my previous list of blog posts to write – what happens when a spouse wants to leave a perfectly good marriage.)

This story about this lady and her lost ten year relationship is a big reason why I have advised in previous articles that people should not “fall into relationships”, but should rather deliberately and intentionally choose relationships with their active, thinking, most rational mind, and their eyes wide open.

Falling into a relationship:
In my mind, this is how falling into a relationship works. Namely, attraction. So you’re working somewhere, say, and there is this guy, and there is just something compelling about him, and you find him so attractive, and the feeling is mutual. Before you know it, you are spending time together, and what may have started off as a friendship pretty soon blossoms into a relationship. There is obviously nothing wrong with this, and many relationships that have started in similar ways have gone on to succeed. However, to me it counts as falling into a relationship. This is because:
– You may not have been in the right time and headspace to actually pursue a relationship
– If attraction was what overwhelmingly drew you together, then you might not have carefully assessed them to see whether the qualities that they have truly match who you are, and what you want from life.
– You might not have done the work within yourself to work out who you truly are, and what you truly want from life, and from that, what you are looking for, and what you need in a relationship.

So then, you might find yourself with someone and over time you slowly realise that they do not represent the future you would like to have. In other words, someone with whom you are not truly compatible. And/or perhaps the relationship was not constructed in a way that tends itself to lasting long – ie, with communication.

Conversely, this is what consciously building a relationship might look like:  Firstly, you know that you want a relationship, and you are in a good place for a relationship. You know that relationships require sacrifice, and you are in a good place in your life to make those sacrifices. Additionally, you have educated yourself about relationships generally. You know the kind of issues or tensions that might arise in relationships, and you have an idea of how to deal with them. You have also developed a close network of support, people to go to to ask for advice as and when necessary, or people who are wiser or more experienced than you to even rant to about your spouse, as and when necessary. (And to be candid, if you are married for long enough, there will be times when it will be necessary!)

Furthermore you have taken the time to get to know yourself. You know your strengths. You know your weaknesses. You know yourself.  You can accurately communicate who you are to a future spouse. You also know the aspects of your character that you need to work on, even though you might not advertise those quite so readily to a future spouse! You also know what you want in life. You know the kind of person you would want to be married to. You know what you could tolerate, versus what you could not tolerate, your absolute must haves, versus your dealbreakers.

And then you can go out, carefully evaluate potential spouses, to see whether they genuinely correspond with who you know you are, where you know you are going.  And then when you have found someone appropriate, then you can take the time to deliberately build a relationship, carefully conscious of the typical challenges that relationships might face, working hard to develop communication etc, building a strong foundation for what will hopefully be a long lifetime together.

You know, I was recently considering this topic but concerning friendship, rather than a romantic relationship. There is someone that I considered a friend. Actually, I deliberately chose her for her qualities as a friend. And yet, in making that choice, I was not quite as knowledgeable then as I am now, I did not know what to look out for. Now I see that we are actually not compatible as close friends, after all. Friendship is a big deal. It involves such a commitment of time. I simply cannot continue investing more “big” time into an ill-judged friendship.  If this is true of a friendship, then how much more is it true of a marriage?  I know that if I found myself in a marriage which turned out to be similarly ill-judged, I would not give up straight away. I would try my hardest to make it work, make it seem beautiful, act as if I am crazy about him. But deep down, it would just be niggling away at me.  You know, I know myself that I would persevere, perhaps indefinitely. However, if something really big came up, that might be my impetus to just walk away, stop investing my effort.

After doing all this work for this blog in thinking ahead to my future marriage, writing all these blog posts, evaluating, analysing, reading constantly, do you not agree that I would be entitled to be more than a little cross if my husband came to me one day and suddenly said, seemingly out of the blue: “I don’t really feel that this marriage is serving my vision for my life!” – or something similar?  No baby!  Here’s the thing though. There will be people like that, who despite seeing all this hard work, could still be capable of coming out and saying something like that! That is why the onus is on me to make sure that I do not marry someone like that. That is why I have to carefully sit and analyse and watch to see who someone truly is, rather than just trusting in their grandiose, sugary promises.

I believe that to avoid this scenario, I have to make sure of a few things:
– I have to commit to who I want to be for the future. For me, this is simple: All for Jesus. This is genuinely true in my life, which makes me an anomaly, even in the church.
– I have to look for someone who is similarly committed to who he wants to be in life, and who is not going to deviate from this. Many men will equally claim to be “All for Jesus”. However, from experience, very few actually are. At least not the Jesus of the Bible!
– I have to commit to who this man is, and who he wants to be. I have to make up my mind that I am going to remain committed to him, as long as he remains committed to who he said that he will be. You know what? There will be ebbs and flows in his commitment to Christ, as there are and will be ebbs and flows in my own commitment to Christ. Even in all that though, we have to remain committed to one another.
– I have to look for someone who will similarly make that commitment to who I am, and who I want to be.
So I have to look for potential husbands who stick to their words, who don’t just speak casually or carelessly. Men who demonstrate determination in their everyday lives.

As well as ebbs and flows in our individual relationships with Christ, there will also be ebbs and flows in our relationship with one another. At some points of marriage, you might want your husband to constantly crowd you, to just be there, all the time. At other times, within the same marriage, you might need your space, but you need to communicate that in a way that does not leave him feeling rejected. You need to build that flexibility into your marriage, so that it can easily twist and turn, and be moulded to the current needs of the partners at any given time. And the way you navigate those twists and turns is with good strong, vulnerable communication. However, from experience, it is really hard to build in communication into a friendship or relationship if it was not built on strong, honest, candid communication to start with. And you also have to be sure of the character of your spouse or partner, and know that they would not react against you due to what you communicate with them.  I wonder whether all this could have been an issue with the lady who lost her ten year relationship:  could it have been that her partner needed space but they just had never built that level of communication in their relationship? And because of that (if true) the relationship, in his opinion just did not have the flexibility to twist to his needs, so he thought it was easier to break it altogether?

Going back to this person I considered a friend, I was wondering whether I needed to offer communication, to explain that our friendship had changed. Ultimately I decided against it, for this reason: well, she had never offered me any communication! This is not a tit-for-tat thing. Rather it is a recognition that communication is hard and it represents effort to get the right tone.  To be candid, I try to work truly hard to get the right tone with people, to let them down gently without making them feel bad, or rejected. And yet, I have found that people often do not make the same effort with me. People can be brusque, or sharp or other things that communicate that they have not made the same effort, or taken account of my feelings as I have with theirs. When I can’t be bothered, or when I am feeling frustrated with one-sided friendships, to be honest, I often just ditch people. This particular person is not someone that I am going to ditch. However, instead of embarking upon a long, carefully thought out explanation, I just thought up something really simple. And from that I thought up a simple principle: if people do not make the effort in communication towards me, then I will not make the effort in communication towards them. Shrug. This all communicates how character can be a real issue in communication. If someone has strong character, and we have that level of friendship, then I hope it is fair to say that I will always be willing to make the effort to communicate.

Ultimately however, if anyone finds himself or herself suddenly being ditched, after many years with your spouse or partner, I would encourage them to be deliberate and intentional for their next relationship.