I'll never forget the anniversary Steve and I celebrated a few years ago. Steve and I had so much fun over lunch talking and laughing. His eyes showed so much excitement when he looked into mine. It should have been my first clue that he was up to something. We got back into the car and headed on the highway only he got on the highway in the wrong direction from where home was. When I asked him about it he replied, "Surprise, you're not going home. I made reservations at a hotel tonight." I was so excited and scared to find out where and what clothes he had brought for me. He had made reservations at our favorite hotel, "The Inn at Honey Run". When I asked him about clothing he replied. "Well remember the big box I put in the car." Then I remembered getting into the car before lunch and hearing him say, "Just a minute, I need to get somethings to take back to the hospital." He was so intent on making sure this would be a surprise that in the few minutes I waited int he car, he told me that he ran to the basement, grabbed a box marked "gauze", dropped it on our closet floor and proceeded to grab some things from my dresser drawer and closet for me in 30 seconds. I laughed until I cried when I realized what he had grabbed. I had just washed all my underwear and they were not back in the drawer as yet so I knew he didn't have any of those, but he had thrown in 4 bras and a bunch of tights. He grabbed my little black dress but no shoes to match and my new sweater but nothing else to wear it with. Make-up but not all of it. While I waited in our hotel room for him to go out to the car and bring in "our box" of clothing, I reflected on how loved I was to have a husband who went through all this trouble to express his love for me by making sure our kids were cared for, getting reservations, ordering flowers to be delivered to our room along with our favorite drink, purchasing small thoughtful gifts (along with a new teddy) for me during our stay and making sure I was kept surprised about the whole thing.
I was blown away. Our marriage had not always been this fun, intimate, spontaneous. In fact, there were years that our marriage was a source of stress and pain for us, we both felt very unloved, there were serious red flags that concerned me, and because of all this we both felt very lonely although we were living together. In fact, I asked Steve once, "How did you feel during the time I either tolerated or rejected your need for sex?" He slowly and thoughtfully responded, "I felt lonely, used, rejected, hurt." I was in shock for two reasons. First because I had no idea he felt that way and second because I would have used the same adjectives to describe how I was feeling. Why is it that we live lives of lonely desperation? I think it's because we fear risking our hearts to the other person. This is how my daughter, Summer put it, "When we shut ourselves down, control, close our hearts to risk, we close our hearts to the joy. We flat line."
A Focus on the Family newsletter sent September 2002 reported the following: "Using data fromt he National Survey of Family and Households (a nationally representative survey with a wide-ranging data set looking at all kinds of family outcomes, including happiness) the reserach team studied 5,232 married adults who were interviewed in the late 1980s. Of these individuals, 645 reported being unhappily married. Five years later, these same adults--some of whom had divorced or separated and some of whom had stayed married-were interviewed again.
The results of these interviews were astounding. They revealed that a full two-thirds of the unhappily married spouses who stayed married were actually happier five yers later! Among those who initially rated their marriages as "very unhappy," but remained together, nearly 80 percent considered themselves "happily married" and "much happier" five years later.
Surprisingly, the opposite is found to be true for those who divorced. The Institute for American Values study confirmed that divorce frequently fails to make people happy because, while it might provide a respite fromt he pain associated with a bad marriage, it also introduces a host of complex new emotional and psychological difficulties over which the parties involved have little control. They include child-custody battles, emotionally scarred children, economic hardships, loneliness, future romantic disappointments and so on. this helps explain why of all the unhappy spouses in the initial survey, only 19 percent of those who got divorced or separated were happy five years later."
No one wakes up in the morning and says, "Today I think I will get a divorse." No it happens one thought at a time, one action at a time, one choice at a time. Remember, people say that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. You say that while you are looking at the marriage a friend has or how wonderful you think her husband is. I say, the grass is greener where you water it. As you water and care for your own marriage, you too will experience greener grass. Dennis Rainey writes in his book Lonely Husbands, Lonely Wives, "Every day each partner in the marriage makes choices that result in oneness or isolation. Make the right choices and you will know love, warmth, acceptance, and the freedom of true intimacy and genuine oneness as man and wife. Make the wrong choices and you will know the quiet desperation of living together but never really touching one another deeply." Make a choice today to communicate love to your spouse.
"When we are embracing and fully engaged in the joy and pleasure God has given us in marriage, it gives us joy. Pray and ask God to make you fully alive to the abundant full life he intended in your oneness. Express to God your needs. He is your source. As you offer it up to him, do your part in working on your marriage, God is responsibile for the rest.
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