Let’s talk about…making an effort

Off the top of my head, the fact that the guy failed to make an effort is the reason I have ended a few potential relationships.

Here is the thing:  I make an absolute ton of effort generally in churches, and in the would-be relationships I have considered.
From what I have seen, I can’t help thinking that many men just bring themselves into the relationship, and think that all they have to do is just be themselves, without exerting any undue effort. But this is so, so wrong, and so so misguided. I wonder whether this might be the reason that so many women initiate divorces?

Here is the thing:  most women, I am sure, apply a LOT of effort in their relationships and marriages. In various traditional cultures, women are socialised to be the ones to do the work to keep their marriage together. Even in less traditional and more progressive cultures like the UK where women rights are more emphasised and celebrated, even there there are still arguably residual traces of the mentality that it is a woman’s job to get a man and keep him interested (and that as long as he is interested that is all that is needed to keep your home intact?)  Hence blog posts suggesting that as a woman it is your job to get him to notice you:  how to keep him chasing you, most relationship articles are directed at women. Historically, men were the ones who held all the power (not least because they were the ones who wrote all the laws, and what a surprise! They wrote all the laws to benefit themselves…) and life as a single woman often meant being poor. So historically it truly was in the woman’s best interests to find a man and keep him interested. So I suspect that historically, all a man did need to do was simply to bring himself to the marriage, and then see if his wife did enough to keep his interest or whether he might prefer to ditch her for someone else. So historically, I’m guessing, men have not really had to wonder what they need to do to keep their wives interested (within reason of course).

But the fact is that times have changed. We women are not as constrained by financial considerations to remain married as we would historically have been, because of course we as women can make our own money now. That means we as women can now afford to cultivate our own expectations for marriage and now we can also evaluate our husbands as they have always evaluated us, and as women we can now also choose to ditch them, if we please. So there is now a greater sense of equality in terms of cultivating expectations. And yet, that has not been matched by an equality in work done within the marriage.  So women still continue to do the lion’s share (or rather the lioness’s) share of work in the marriage, while many men apparently think that all they as men need to do is just “be themselves”.  I can see how this would lead to a deep sense of resentment. Especially if the man expects to call all the shots, while I as a woman am the one actually doing all the work. Especially if the men just don’t get it. You as a woman might try to express things as softly and as graciously as you can, but he just does not see it. If it was me, this kind of situation would make me feel immensely resentful. This would be all the more true if he seems to act like he is somehow doing me a favour.  Just prior to writing this post, I’ve been reading a few posts by men writing with regret about the role they each played in bringing an end to their marriages. And this seems to be the common thread: that they took their wives for granted, they did not listen when their wives were complaining, in retrospect they’ve realised that they were not pulling their weight.

Men, you need to pull your weight in marriage!  At least if you are hoping to be married to me!  I personally need to feel that my husband is making an effort that is commensurate to my own – and I plan to make a lot of effort. People might think that I could solve the problem by dropping my effort to match his own. However, a low-effort marriage is simply not what I have been dreaming of, even if it is mutually low-effort, because I have not been dreaming of a low-effort life. Honestly, I would rather remain single. I am simply a high-effort person and I love seeing the fruits of my high efforts in different aspects of my life. At least if I remained single I could continue to invest high efforts in different aspects of my life, rather than see the 50% of my life which my marriage represents swallowed up in one disappointing mass of nothingness. (High effort but low tempo, which might sound like a bit of a contradiction.  I dream of investing my efforts in seemingly “low-key” things like just chilling while snuggling next to Mr HW, hugging, talking, laughing, quietly watching sunsets with our arms around each other rather than constantly dashing around from one highly energetic date to another.)  “You know Tosin, people don’t  always want to “make an effort”.  Sometimes people just want to chill!”  I definitely get that, and that is something that I would want too. I think that in life and marriage, you have to be kind and gentle with yourself and one another, letting yourself sometimes be lazy, as the relationship equivalent of when you can’t be bothered to cook, but would prefer to order takeaway instead. On the whole though, I am looking for a man who dreams of an amazing marriage as I do, and who is committed to making the effort to make that happen, as I am, and who appreciates that his own effort matters too, and who is not just going to sit back and wait for an amazing marriage to somehow construct itself around him.

So then, the point that I want to make in all of this is that love and marriage means making an effort. It means prioritising your spouse and family every day, rather than taking them for granted. It means making an effort to actually show up and listen when they are trying to tell you something. It means not minimising their concerns or complaints. Speaking from personal experience, by the time I get around to complaining about something, I am usually already very angry about it. But all the same, I will try to phrase it gently, to not make it seem like such a big deal. If my husband then (mis)reads that behaviour, and decides to disregard it because I am “clearly not that upset”, then that would make me even angrier.  Pile such grievances on top of one another over a matter of years, and it may reach the point where I am full of so much resentment and frustration that I am just past caring, and like so many other frustrated women I would just walk away. And even if hubby should want to discuss it, I just would not want to know.

If my future husband is reading this, please know that I will need you to sort things out in real time. If I say that I am upset about something, I will need you to take that seriously. I don’t think I am going to be one of those wives who says that everything is fine when it’s not fine. Rather, I suspect that I am going to sit down and try to write out my frustrations in great detail.  (And this whole blog is a practice run!)

It works both ways too of course, and I hope my husband can trust that I will be doing my best to actually hear what he is saying.  All the same, this is why it is so important to me to choose the right guy in the first place. How I wish I could assume that every man who claims to be a Christian would be automatically sincere, conscientious and attentive in relationships. However, I know from experience that that is simply not true. On one hand emotional loneliness is very much real in my life and constantly compelling me to find a husband. On the other hand, I know that I need to take my time to make the right choice, precisely because of this loneliness. Otherwise, if I make the wrong choice, I will simply find myself lonelier than ever.

 


PS, after writing the post above, I’ve gone back to that set of posts, and am now reading a post about “The Top 6 Complaints Unhappy Wives Have About Their Husbands”.  And I’ve literally just read the first one “he does not listen”, and I’ve run back here to write about it.
What occurred to me is this: women are notorious for talking a lot. (I clearly blog a lot here!) Perhaps women talk so much that some men legitimately don’t know what they need to listen to, or what they need to make changes with. So I’m guessing, many such men secretly decide to ignore everything that the wife actually says, and look out only for tangible action.

However, for me, if things reach a point where I have to take tangible action, by then it is often too late. From my perspective men are always talking about how much they want and need to be respected. Well guess what? As a woman I would like to feel respected too, I would like my husband to take me seriously when I tell him things that matter to me. So perhaps learning to sit and listen to all those dreary details is simply the price that as a man you must pay for getting married!

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PPS:  Another post idea that has occurred to me! I was recently thinking about the fact that I am currently blessed with a quiet, low-effort life –  or do I mean low tempo?! And I realised that the reason I am currently able to live such a peaceful life is because I ditched many of my “high-tempo” friends. The sad truth is that in many Christian circles, people judge you for the clothes that you wear and the lifestyle that you appear to be living – and I myself did the same thing to other people countless times, before I started understanding more about money. To win their favour or their approval, people expect you to be living a life that has been visibly “blessed”, in financial terms. So they expect you to wear gorgeous clothes and expensive hairstyles, or at least be regularly updating your wardrobe, drive an expensive looking car, aspire to have a high-flying job earning megabucks. Or spend a lot of money going out to eat. This is what I mean here about being “high tempo”. And then there is a way that they will communicate that expectation, often without directly saying anything. All the same they will communicate that you are clearly not sufficiently blessed by God, and you need to try harder. Thinking about a particular church, unfortunately, I was formulating my theory about living a simpler life at the time.  I still made an effort, but it was distinctly simple.  (Seriously Tosin, if you are in a church where people are applying pressure on you to dress a certain way to prove that you are “blessed”, for the sake of your future wealth get out of there and stop going!)

From my current perspective, oh my goodness it is so clear now that the pressure was real, and it had a real effect on me, whether I liked it or not. I have now realised this because that pressure is absolutely gone from my life, and I do not dedicate any headspace to it whatsoever. The truth is that I have broken off all those close interactions with people and only interact with them via Facebook.  Just by cutting them off, it has freed my mind so much. Man, you don’t appreciate how much pressure is exerted on you and your lifestyle choices by the people who you choose to hang around with.  And the irony is that now I understand a lot more about money, I know that a lot of these people who appeared to be living the life would actually have been living in debt, or close to it.  Many people do not know, as I equally did not know until recently, that the way to truly attain financial success is by minimising your spending on depreciating assets or liabilities, such as cars, jewellery, hairstyles and exactly those other supposed “markers of success” that this church subtly suggested, and instead saving up to invest in income-producing assets.
But thankfully I know now, and there is simply no-one in a million years who is going to persuade me to go back to spending like that – except you of course my darling Huggie-Wuggie! This is a necessary investment for my marriage and I am willing to do whatever it takes, that is reasonable and holy, to delight my husband.  I have tried to gently communicate some of these ideas to others about the value of simplicity, but unfortunately some people are so willfully uneducated, despite sometimes having multiple degrees, that even when you try to explain to them, they just shout all the louder.

There are some verses in the Bible that I just did not understand, or even believe, really, at first.  And yet the more time goes by, the more I realise how true they are.  In short, the people you choose to associate with will assert such a great influence on you, in ways that you perhaps do not notice or appreciate at the time, as I did not.  Anyway, some of these verses are as follows:
“He who walks with wise men will be wise (but the companion of fools will be destroyed.)” As a child, I honestly could not envisage how this could be true. Why one earth should the people I surround myself with make any difference to my own wisdom? And yet it is possibly the single most effective thing I have ever done to contribute to my own success, to become hyperselective about my friends, deliberately seeking people out for their character, and crucially, releasing the friendship of people who do not represent who I want to be like. now that I have learned to cultivate boundaries, suddenly I have an abundance of time.  Suddenly I can now invest some solid time into my own God-given hopes and dreams.
This feeds directly into the next verse “The righteous man chooses his friends carefully (for the way of the wicked leads them astray).”  Man, I was recently reflecting how I used to be so desperate for friendships, that I would eagerly jump for whatever crumbs of friendship people would throw at me.  What a revelation it was when I finally realised that actually, I bring a lot to the table too, and when I grew fed up of being taken advantage of, I realised that I need to have standards for people I cultivate in close friendship.

The final verse is this:  “Evil conversation corrupts good behaviour”.  The word “conversation” there is misleading to modern readers; this verse is taken from the King James Version as I know it roughly off by heart in that translation; in the 17th Century context “conversation” did not mean what we think of as a verbal conversation or discussion. Rather it meant the people that you associate with.

You know what is interesting/curious?  I have noticed that even when you have finally learned these lessons as I have, people continue to try to draw you into their camp, or tribe or army, so that they can continue to exert their influence on you, or encourage you to spend your time fulfilling their goals.  But why on earth would I ever go back to this, once I have had a sweet taste of hard-won liberation?

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