Men, Count your Blessings
Men, Count your Blessings
Men, Count your Blessings
The exchanging of wedding vows is one of the most powerful experiences that a person can have in their lifetime. On their wedding day, a couple promises to Love, Honor, and Cherish, each other in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for as long as they both shall live. It all sounds great, but at the end of the day, these are just words. They will only have real impact, if they are taken to heart.
I believe that we all have the best of intentions when we marry. When we exchange those vows, we fully intend to carry through on them. We are sincerely committed to each other and to the marriage. We also do our absolute best to live up to the promises in the early years of the relationship. We strive to be on our best behavior when in the presence of our spouse, and to treat them in a way that is loving and respectful.
However, the honeymoon phases eventually ends and the reality of day to day life starts to take a toll. As the years pass, that heartfelt commitment that we expressed on our wedding day seems to become less and less important. We stop making that extra effort to make our spouse happy, and we stop maintaining our best behavior with them. We will keep up appearances for the sake of our image to the outside world, but we are not actually walking the walk.
Is it really true that familiarity breeds contempt?
To an extent, this may be true. In the early days of a marriage we are still getting know our spouse. New and interesting patterns are emerging and it all feels exciting. As time passes, our spouse starts to become predictable. As we settle into routines, the incentive to keep things fresh and romantic becomes lost in the daily grind. We stop appreciating our spouse for being the person that supports us and our emotional needs and start thinking of them as just another fixture in our life.
In many cases, we also start to blame our spouse for the fact that life is not turning out as we had hoped. We begin to direct our frustration, anger, and sour moods at the one person that we should be closest to. We somehow lose the ability to appreciate the good that they bring into our lives, and focus only on what they are not doing. We begin to dwell on the negative.
Of course, negative moments happen in every marriage. We all have them, and it is not an indicator that the marriage is broken. Even the healthiest of relationships will experience bumps in the road. In a healthy marriage, when problems arise, the couple works through them because they know that the marriage is too important to allow it to be torn apart by little things. It is not the absence of problems that defines a good marriage. It is the fact that the couple do not dwell on the negatives that allows their marriage to remain strong over several decades and countless challenges.
When a marriage goes bad, it is because the couple has allowed their focus to move away from their shared life. They have allowed their personal agendas to become more important than the marriage. They stop working to build positives, and just dwell on negatives.
Imagine what would happen if we approached all of our relationships in the world this way. Suppose that you allowed yourself to dwell on only the negative aspects of being a parent. Suppose that you blamed your kids for all the problems that you have with them and allowed yourself to believe that the cause of these problems is that you just don't have good kids. Suppose that you allowed yourself to believe that you just need to find the right kids, and then you can be happy. Perhaps you started parenting other kids on the side.
You may be saying to yourself, that this is a ridiculous scenario. I love my kids and I would never give up on parenting them. If issues came up, I would work through them. I would not just walk away. I would find ways to make it work.
Parenting may be an extreme example, but the same can be said for work relationships, friendship relationships, and church relationships. We go out into the world, our job, our families, our church, and even the grocery store and do our best to make things work. We treat people with respect and kindness. We put our best foot forward and try to find the happy middle ground when problems arise. Even when dealing with people we just met and may never see again, we can manage to be civil and positive.
Yet when we walk in the door to our home at the end of the day, and come face to face with the one person in the world who is supposed to be our closet ally and supporter, we seem to lose that desire to be accommodating. We leave all of that civility on the door mat and allow ourselves to sink into selfishness.
We come home from work tired, frustrated, and angry. Our wives have been home all day with the kids, and they are also tired, frustrated and just as worn out. We take our negative energy and dump it onto our spouse. They throw their negativity back. Sure, it is nice to vent sometimes, but if this is the daily routine and it repeats over and over, the effect on our marriage can be devastating.
Clearly we would not take out our frustration with the kids, our boss, our coworkers or friends in this manner. That would not be appropriate in anyone's book. We would loose our job, our friends, and even our family members would eventually prefer not to interact with us. So why do we allow ourselves to treat the one we love the most with the least amount of respect and appreciation? As the old saying goes "We hurt the ones we love".
It is also true that many of us are not willing to invest the effort to make our own marriages work. We believe that we are just too tired to be affectionate, and too tired to be civil and way too tired to have sex. Again, this is an area in which our marriage, which is supposed to be the most important relationship in our lives, is given less consideration than the other connections that we have.
Would your boss accept that you are just too tired to do your job today and you have no idea when you will feel like doing it? Would he accept that you just mouthed off to him because you were in a bad mood and he should just let it go? Would he accept that you just needed to vent and you don't really think that he is a terrible boss?
Would you tell your kids that they cannot have a hug because you are too tired and just want to be left alone? Would you think they were needy for wanting to spend time with you? Would your kids accept that they are just not doing enough to make you feel affection toward them?
Pretty unlikely, so then why do we so often do this with our spouse? Why do we always ignore the needs of the one person that we should be taking the time to share our life with? Why do we go out of the way to keep our boss, our kids, our parents, our friends, and strangers that we meet on the street happy, and then invest so little into the one person that will return what would actually make us feel better, loved, appreciated, and cared for.
To some extent, I think that many of us overestimate our spouses, and underestimate the needs of the marriage. We think that our spouse should be able to handle our negativity. They should have enough back bone to just deal with it. If we do not show appreciation for them, we expect that they will just know some how that we love them. And surely they will understand that when we say no to sex over and over again, it is not really rejection, it is just that we are too tired. We expect them to just deal with all of this.
However, when one of our own needs is not being met, the situation is different. We expect that they should be able to manage all the details of their own life and still be available to us whenever required. We expect them to push other things aside for us when required, and then leave us alone until we need them again.
Do you see the problem here? We all expect to be at the top of our spouse's priority list, while simultaneously relegating them to the bottom of our priority list. It seems to me that we have this whole thing backwards.
Your marriage should be the number one priority in your life.
You can find a new job, new friends, and the people you pass in the store will never see you again. Your spouse is part of your life every day. Your marriage should be for life. Nobody else has committed to you in that way. Only your spouse has vowed to stick it out with you through thick and thin, for better or for worse, for as long as you both shall live.
Many of us forget that marriage is a wonderful blessing. We forget what it is like to be alone, single, and wanting a partner, lover, and mate. We take each other and our marriage for granted. Or worse yet, we take the attitude that it's not really that important. We stop making a conscious effort to keep our marriage strong. We stop making our marriage the number one priority. We stop meeting our spouse's needs and the marriage begins to starve.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we are not fully committed.
Somewhere in the back of our minds we may believe that our spouse is the cause of all our unhappiness. We may allow ourselves to feel that if this does not work out, we can just move on to someone new. Considering that divorce rates are hovering around 50%, there are obviously a lot of people who think that ensuring their own happiness is just a matter of finding a better spouse.
Suppose that you did walk away from your current marriage. Suppose that you found someone else who was closer to your idea of what a spouse should be. At first it would feel great. This new person would make a special effort to meet your needs, just like your old spouse did in the beginning. They would be on their best behavior, just like your old spouse was. But eventually, that phase would end. The infatuation always wears off, and you could find yourself back in the same situation.
Many people divorce, remarry, and then come to realize that what they had in their old marriage was not so bad. They regret not trying harder to make the changes that would have allowed their marriage to be fulfilling and happy. If they would have taken the time to count their blessings, and appreciate what they had with each other, perhaps their old marriage could have lasted.
The basic truth is that a marriage relationship is a living thing. It needs to be nurtured in order to grow and thrive. It takes work to keep it going through all of the challenges that will inevitably pop up as the years go by. When you see a happy older couple sitting two tables over at the restaurant, don't kid yourself into thinking that they got lucky. Luck may help you find a person, but it takes effort to make it work long term.
Stop daydreaming about a magical person who will be exactly how you want them to be, and start investing the time and energy to make your current marriage work again.
Stop dwelling on the things about your spouse that you do not like, and remember their good points. Appreciate them for who they are, and who they could be with some love and encouragement.
Count your blessings and make an honest assessment of yourself before you decide to pull the plug on your marriage. Are you doing all that you can do to build a happy marriage? Is your spouse the number one priority in your life? Is it reasonable for you to ask your spouse to conform to all of your ideals, and meet all of your needs, while you continue to ignore what they want and need from the relationship?
Marriage requires two people to work. Are you doing your share, or are you just expecting to be carried?
Most couples fall into this rut without even knowing it; it starts out small and just keeps growing until it reaches the point of no return, the point where you look at each other and can no longer see the good in each other, the point where the negatives are the only thoughts and memories that we allow our minds to see.
We all need to realize that the person we loved, the person we cherished and vowed to spend our life with through good times and bad, is still the same person we are with today, we have allowed the negatives to blind us to what we once had, we all need to count our blessings. We still have what we wanted in our spouse, should we choose to look past the negative and bring out the positives in each other.
Even if your marriage is not that bad, it's never too late to make it even better.
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