She climbs the steps of the extinct volcano and hurries down the path to find her special bench.
The view here overlooks Portland and she wishes he was here to share the beauty of it all.
She does this every day.
She watches the older couple who walk their dog and the young couple who still hold hands go by.
She hears a single pair of footsteps and turns with anticipation but it’s not him.
She feels her face get flush with shame as she reminds herself how silly it is to hope he’ll accidentally show up today.
That’s the only way it could happen, by accident.
Can it really be called waiting if she’s the only one who knows that she’s there?
Some days she hugs herself as the sun sets and the tears fall.
Some days she’s just numb.
She just sits fuming, mad at him for not meeting her here.
For leaving her alone.
But most of all she feels a hopeless anger at herself because she knows every day she sits here she is telling herself the pain of being alone is the cost of not feeling the pain of telling him about the bench, about the life she dreams about sharing with him, the pain of admitting she’s not ok, risking the invitation and him not showing up.
And she hates herself for being scared and for blaming him.
“Honey, I’m going to bed now.”
Shakes her from her reverie and she watches his back as he heads down the hall.
She reaches briefly for him but catches herself and the sob trying to escape her chest.
It’s not just from the regret of giving another evening to Netflix.
“He’s a good man. I know he loves me.” She reminds herself it’s just that the park was looking especially beautiful tonight for some reason.
Another opportunity lost to tell him about the bench she has set aside for them in her heart.
Here’s a skip-a-session-of-marriage-counseling-and-go-on-a-date-instead topic to talk about.
Instead of the typical I-Statement:
I feel_____because_____
I want/need_____, would you______.
Try this:
I think our marriage would be better if I______.
I’m sorry I haven’t______.
I will______.
Is there anything else that would help you? Help us?
Is there anything you’d like me do or say more?
Is there anything you’d like me to do or say less?
Instead of focusing on how you are being disappointed and the faults of your spouse, you can focus on your contribution to the problem, apologize for it and commit to working on the only person you can control, yourself.
If you don’t have time to watch/listen to the video, here’s what I wrote before recording, not a full transcript.
I hope you are well.
I know some of you aren’t. You’ve lost your way. You’re marriage is struggling. You feel like giving up and that scares you. Or you don’t feel anything. You just don’t care and you’re not sure if you love your spouse anymore. You’re just going through the motions.
It hurts to lose your best friend. Some of you, the isolation of this struggle is making you lose your faith in God and the church. It hurts to see your wife so focused on the kids and Pinterest. You don’t like seeing her so stressed and unhappy. You feel like you’ve failed her.
It hurts to see your husband so focused on sports, on work. You feel rejected by his anger or silence. It’s painful to know you’ve drifted apart but not know what to do about it It’s discouraging that every time to try to work on it, it just seems to blow up in your face and get worse. And it’s demoralizing when you remember when you enjoyed sex but now you just feel used, resentful and unsatisfied with that.
In the middle of it, there’s moments of hope. You still hope you it’ll get better someday. Maybe when the kids are older, when you’re less busy. But you aren’t sure if you’ll make it. Will will be left of the both of you to salvage when the pain is tearing away at your souls, at your love for each other?
Here’s a few things to find and fight your way back.
1) Own your part. If you’re on a path of drifting away, stop, assess what is pulling you away or what are you choosing and turn back. Turn back toward your spouse, toward home. The home you had in each other. For some of you, this might mean repenting and turning back towards God and dealing with being spiritually off track. Take back control of what you can. Stop blameshifting or being victimized by your partner.
2) Apologize. Ask forgiveness for your contribution to the problem. Even if they don’t react well at first. If there’s a lot of hurt and anger stored up, go slow. This is hard.
3) Ask them for what they need or want for things to be better. For them to trust you again. For them to feel closer, to feel valued and important in your life again. For them to heal and feel safe with you again. This can be risky, your spouse may not be open to sharing this because they may not want to be disappointed and hurt. They may be so hurt or angry that they actually may not want you to succeed. Try anyway.
4) Follow up on if it is working. Set behavioral goals, what you will do and say differently. Actions and following through on agreements and commitments help to restore trust, not wishful thinking and words. So checking back in after a week and asking, How did that go? What went well? What didn’t? Did you do what you said you were going to do? What got in the way? What do we need to adjust? What will we work on next?
5) Ask for help. If this doesn’t work or is too hard. That can be from a friend, a pastor, a counselor.
Have your fights in front of others when you are newly married (or even better: when you are engaged).
Why? Because the damage is extremely hard to undo. Trust me, it sucks.
Here’s just a few things that fighting badly does:
It trains you to trust each other less.
It erodes goodwill, kindness, empathy and generosity.
It reinforces bitterness and hopelessness.
(With hope, a couple can just about work anything, they can regain trust, rekindle feelings of love. Without it, they say things like I love and care for her/him but…)
It brings out your worst and turns you into someone you despise.
You feel out of control.
You become more vulnerable to addictions and sinful choices.
It steals away your fun, your best friend.
It gives you an excuse to focus all your attention on your baby/kids, which has negative connotations for *their* lives.
It makes sexual intimacy (if it is still going down, which when you’re young, a lot of you can still override your feelings to make it work), less about emotional intimacy and more just about drive and just something physical. Which ends up making one or both of you feeling used.
It brings up all your baggage and trauma from your family of origins and puts in a chaotic blender so that it seems like you’ll never get a grip on life or that any growth, healing or progress you’ve made in that area instantly becomes undone whenever you try to JUST HAVE A FREAKING CONVERSATION!
Bottom line: it makes you feel unloved, unwanted, uncared for, unimportant and alone.
I could go on. I’m sure you could add more.
Have your fights in front of others. Don’t just get advice. (Yes, I know this advice).
Don’t just retreat to your respective corners, to your respective cornermen/support people at coffee or online.
Fight to resolutions.
Fight through to agreements.
Let the real-time support of others observing and coaching you, train you that fighting is not bad.
This can transform your experience that every time you try to talk IT DOESN’T WORK! to WE CAN DO THIS!
The more agreements you work through together, the more success you experience, provides tremendous safety and security.
You learn this early on and it will provide a lot of protection and joy in your marriage.
and how impossible that seems can be very discouraging and frustrating
“It gets worse before it gets better”
Couples don’t really realize how true this is until they start doing the work of marriage counseling. And a lot don’t continue because it’s so hard.
That’s because feelings like hurt, betrayal, disappointment, that have been stuffed down for years, start to come out.
Even when there’s improvement, that can be a negative too, because then the regret and hurt of “Why couldn’t she or he have done this for me and our marriage before now? ” is just one more reminder of how broken and hopeless it all feels.
There’s a grief at suffering in marriage that comes when your spouse starts treating you the way the could and should have in the first place.
It’s like resetting an incorrectly healed bone break. It has to be broken again and reset to heal properly.
Hardness, isolation, unhealthy patterns, addictions, bitterness, self-protection, lies – just a few things that have to be broken.
Sometimes false hopes and expectations have to die completely and the myth of certainty and control along with it in order for hope and trust and love – still tentative but now unfettered by the need for certainty – to come alive again.
Often the worst/hardest part of all, is facing the fears that have been avoided, fears like abandonment, rejection, being unloved, unworthy, unattractive, failure, being alone.
It feels like death because it is a death.
But there’s life after walking through this valley.
A friend of mine is getting married soon and it has me remembering the song “God Bless The Broken Road” made popular by Rascal Flatts and Selah.
It starts
I set out on a narrow way many years ago Hoping I would find true love along the broken road
I love the song but lately I’m not so sure about the idea of broken roads.
Or “others who broke broke my heart” being Northern Stars.
Just because the road isn’t straight doesn’t mean it’s broken.
There may be brokenness along the way to be sure but just because it’s hard doesn’t make it bad.
It’s the scenic route.
And you see things and meet people you need to meet along the way. Some of those people are rule outs, to clarify the type of people you want to be your friends. Or spouse. And some of the things you see are things of your own design, by your own choice, that are really bad ideas.
But you learn and grow, ask forgiveness and heal.
And it all adds up to forming who you are and discovering what ultimately will bring you joy and peace. Hopefully, you discover God along the way too.
You can work hard and battle and hustle and still not be in a hurry.
Sometimes the road gets straighter, if you just pause and enjoy the scenery.
Every few months, three or four times a year, when driving to or from the counseling office while thinking or praying for clients, I write a poem here’s a recent one It helps me let go of the outcomes while still holding on to hope for them especially when things get really hard I hope it might encourage you if this is something you’re struggling with even if you are single and not in a relationship right now.
Here’s a video blog (in three parts) for newlyweds on some areas to watch for as you start married life. I’ve included a written summary below (not a transcription).
It was fun to make this but hard to organize.
I might make this a blog series to say more in depth about each area.
“You get what you create and you get what you allow.” – Henry Cloud
Here are a few areas that are worth paying attention to early on in marriage, being aware of them and dealing with them proactively can help you create the marriage and family you’ve dreamed about and prevent unhealthy and destructive behaviors, attitudes and patterns from damaging your marriage. Marriage can be the absolute greatest thing, it can also be the hardest, scariest, stressful thing. Getting off to a good start can be extremely helpful.
Talking about, exploring and working on these areas will help you flesh out what your marriage will look and sound like on the surface and on a deeper level, help you define what it will be at its core, its heart.
1) Practical matters. Deciding and sorting out what your marriage and home will look like. Where will everything go? Where will you live? Who will pay the bills? Who will take out the trash? There are dozens or hundreds of little, mundane, everyday choices to sort out. This is also related to the issue of…
2) Time.
How will you spend your time? Together and alone. How will you balance it? This is something to work through day-to-day, week-to-week. Pulling back, there is also the question of what will the rhythm of your year look? How will you spend the holidays? How will you balance work and leisure and vacations? And an even bigger picture question, what will you give your lives to? How will you invest your life, in terms of work and career? That touches on the bigger question of…
3) Meaning.
What will all this mean? What will getting married mean to you? Individually and as a couple? Often, little issues become big issues because there are underlying issues as stake in conflict and in the process of sorting things out at the start of marriage. Tim Keller in the book The Meaning of Marriage describes a dynamic that a lot of couples face today: a deep disillusionment about marriage, on one hand, and a deep hope or expectation about marriage at the same time. We can bring a lot of unspoken, deep rooted fears, hurts and hopes to marriage and a few weeks of pre-marital counseling often just touches the surface of them. Having doubts, second thoughts, anxiety about marriage can be really For Christians, marriage is a symbol of the relationship of Christ and the church; what will that look like for us?
4) Identity.
Who am I now as a married person? What will be different now? What will our marriage be? Even couples that have been together for years can be shaken by the new realities and identity of being married. Where do I end? and where do we begin? What issues are mine? What issues are ours? What does the role of being your husband, or wife look like? Who will I be to you? Will it be what we saw modeled and defined by our parents or will we create something different?
5) Communication and conflict resolution.
Listening well, expressing empathy, giving honest feedback. Make it a habit to give honest feedback, even if it’s hard and risks conflict. The pain of feedback early on is much less than the pain of going along and being less than honest and the whole truth coming out later. Develop language or a ritual of apology, making amends, forgiving and reconciling. Learn how to support each other during stress and struggle vs. fixing them. Learn how to ask for help and what you want. Be assertive and don’t just give in and comply in order to collaborate and create agreements and solutions that work for both of you.
6) Sex.
Sexual intimacy ideally is a natural expression of the emotional and spiritual intimacy you experience. It is also something that develops and grows. Address early on (get help if necessary) struggles, in order to get off to a good start. Whether you wait for marriage to be sexually intimate or have been prior to marriage, the transition in to marriage and all the changes mentioned above can make this area difficult. It can be hard to talk about, something that ought to help you feel closer becoming something that pushes you apart. Hurt, rejection, “failure”, anxiety, tension, avoidance, frustration, impatience, feeling used can all quickly enter in to derail this vital area of marital happiness and satisfaction.
7) Stress.
Related to #5. As a couple, it will help to communicate about health and unhealthy ways to cope and manage stress (and busyness). Stress often impairs or kills empathy. Be vigilant at deal with it and other gremlins, like unfair fighting, selfishness, dishonesty. One of the couples I worked with said it well in describing their struggles: “We had lost our ability to console each other.” Protect that, it’s one of the best things about being married, having someone who can console and support and be there for you. If not, the person who you turned to for support and comfort can easily become the one who causes hurt and stress.
What do you think? Is there another area that you would add for newly married couples to pay attention to?
Ten obvious-but-we’re-in-counseling-because-we-forgot Marriage Facts.
Fact #1 : Your spouse is different than you. They just are.
Fact #2: What you believe about those differences and how you react/respond will make or break your marriage.
Fact #3: Your spouse is an adult. You can’t control him or her. The moments you forget this you give yourself permission to weaken your marriage.
Fact #4: Spending time doing fun stuff together and having awesome uninterrupted conversations were two key things that made you say “Hey, we should, like totally, do this together for the rest of our lives!” That and the kissing. (Oh yes, the kissing! More on that later)
Fact #5: You married your spouse because of the strengths and qualities you admired in them, fixating on their weaknesses will make you doubt that decision. If you mentally tear down your spouse, because you are one, you tear yourself down. And it’s not very sexy.
Fact #6: Your spouse is your best friend. Don’t be mean to your best friend.
Fact #7: Honesty is still the best policy. Remember when finally finding someone to be completely open and honest with felt so good? Don’t go back into hiding.
Fact #8 Being adult doesn’t mean being grumpy. Have fun. Simple, obvious, not easy. Make space for it. Ruthlessly deal with stress and busyness. “Neglect” and sacrifice other things and priorities for your spouse, like you used to.
Fact #9 Sex is good. So much to say here. Don’t make excuses. Find your way back to each other, under the sheets. Whatever takes away or has taken away the longing, desire and urgency – address it. Maturity and the kids’ schedules and getting old together doesn’t mean losing creativity, fun and playfulness. Chase each other around the house even if only metaphorically and behind closed doors and that brief window of time on your weekly calendars.
Fact #10 Marriage is not just about you and your unmet needs. Not to discount your needs or happiness but remember your purpose, your center. For me and Julie, it’s our faith and relationships with God. Under stress and conflict and overwhelm it’s easy to go into survival mode. Remember that you had dreams, purpose, mission, something beyond yourself when you started your life together, something beyond just the two of you.
Remembering this humbles me, makes me feel grateful to have such an amazing spouse. It makes me feel so blessed. It reminds me I’m forgiven and I can forgive, small and big things.
When you step back and consider this, the things that divide you get smaller. And the things that brought you together, that keep you together and will see you through, come back in and empower you to continue to love each other.
