Jon and I are constantly trying to be mindful about our relationship. Whether recognizing how we communicate, being honest about our feelings and hurts or coping with new dynamics and stresses like having a baby!
We read a book called "And Baby Makes Three" by
John and Julie Gottman. It was really good, and they have another book about marriage that doesn't have to do with adding a child that you might check out - The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.
Anyway, my mom sent this short observation about a Grown- Up Marriage. I like it. Especially the part about paying attention. It seems so easy to get into the rut of not listening, or noticing my spouse, especially with all the distractions of technology and work!
Living in a Grown-up Marriage
We marry in absolute ignorance and stay married by being lucky and doing the work.
The promise we make to each other is that we'll protect and preserve our marriage, that we'll feed and watch over our marriage, that we'll defend it against attacks --- even our own. We stay married because we promised to stay married.
We stay married through the darkest of days because our shared commitment is to this "third thing," this marriage we are creating.
We might choose to see married love not merely as what we possess at the start of our marriage, but as a heroic adventure, a magnificent accomplishment that we strive to achieve together over the years. We might choose to cultivate a "romance of the ordinary."
Pay attention. Never stop paying attention.
Faced with the tough reality that, in this or that regard, he'll never change, she'll never change, we stay married by reminding ourselves what we like about, what connects us to, our partner, and by letting the emphasis fall on what is right instead of what is wrong in our marriage.
We stay married by making some peace with what can't be changed. We also stay married by adapting to change. These changes will require us to be flexible and adaptable and sometimes to endure substantial pain. They will also require us to keep revising our definition of happiness, revising it to reflect the shifting realities of our life and our age.
The lengths we go to stay married might include attempting to live by the following precepts:
- Try to be nice to each other, even if you don't particularly feel like it.
- Try to give to each other without being asked.
- Remember that, like charity, courtesy begins at home.
- Offer a little more praise and a lot less criticism than you think your spouse deserves.
- Honor each other's good will and good intentions, even when you don't get what you need.
- When possible, laugh.
- Don't expect to get all that you need from each other.
- Figure out how intimate you can be without suffocation and how separate you can be without alienation.
- When possible, say yes to having sex - with the husband or wife to whom you are married. Keep in mind that fidelity is not in the lap of the gods but a choice you consciously make, again and again.
- Compromise. Compromise some more. It helps, in our efforts at compromise, if we can distinguish injuries to our soul from injuries merely to our sensibilities.
Being happily married means regarding the person we’ve married as our lover and our source of joy, our comrade and comforter. It means knowing, when times are tough, that we won’t be alone.
Marriage, which can be the most vexatious of human relationships, can also be the engine for our growth. For in making some sort of peace with the disenchantments, demands, and astonishing complexities of ordinary everyday married life, we can create a grown-up marriage.
Adapted from: Judith Viorst, Grown-up Marriage, New York: The Free Press, 2003, pp. 1, 256-262.
