"That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle that the Vatican has overlooked." -Bill Cosby
Marriage is a miracle even when we don't see it as such. It endures a lot. Anyone who tells you that they have a so-called 'perfect' marriage has willingly redefined the word 'perfect' because marital perfection, like money in a bank account, changes over time and comes in different increments.
Your marriage is 'perfect' at the very beginning, lots of lust helps that along and the sweet knowledge that no one in the entire history of humankind has ever loved the way you love each other. This is the small change phase, the beginning of banking your love. The perfection is the fact that it's brand-new; unsullied by the realities of life.
A few years down the marital road marriage's perfection lies in acceptance of the other person's faults; faults you could swear they didn't always have. The sex is still great and that along with love enhances your life. Call it the 'we're not rich but we're not broke either' phase. You annoy each other but you can overlook a few problems and you know that the relationship is still perfect and will only get better.
Ever hear the expression, "I had plans but then life happened"? That can put a dent into your 'savings' plan.
Daily life takes an unexpected toll on your marriage account and intimacy takes a back seat to exhaustion. 24 hour days are crammed with 48 hour demands. This is a period that makes you wonder why you ever thought getting married was such a good idea! You change, he changes, and so does your life together. You're so involved with everything else, there's no time for 'just the two of us.' Your life begins to have separate paths and you hope those paths will lead back to the center where you first started.
The phase that can bankrupt your marriage is one where you are overwhelmed with life's problems that cause heated arguments. Job loss, aging parents, 'cold' spells in and out of the bedroom, and lack of communication take a tremendous lot out of your account. You don't want to deal with it all anymore. This is the time you just want to cash out and cut your losses. But something stops you from ending the relationship. Why? Who knows! Maybe marriage is that overlooked miracle after all.
If the marriage, with all its ups and downs, has been a fairly productive and good one, we begin to remember how we felt in the glow of new love. That love was a precious gift but, like any gift, the glow tarnished over time. This doesn't mean that you're not fond of that gift. It just means that you get caught up in every day matters and the gift is put on the shelf.
In marriage we know that we are loved, we assume it; we take it for granted. Life takes over and our marriage takes a back seat. But then there comes a moment when we remember the feeling of being in love and can literally fall in love all over again.
At a recent seminar on relationships and marriage, a woman told me how one small incident caused her to re-evaluate her ideas about her feelings for her husband.
"We were getting ready for a party and my husband was tying his tie. It was something I've seen him do many times but this time I really watched him. I saw how he concentrated, getting it just right. In the mirror he saw me watching and gave me a wink and a smile. He did something like that when we were dating and I felt my heart jump. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed with love."
A colleague once said that she fell in love with her husband again after he quit his job.
"It was a high stress job and he was so miserable in it. When he found a position that he really liked, he became a different man. No, that's not entirely true. Actually he became the man he was when I first met him; laid-back and happy. Seeing him like that I remembered falling in love with him in the first place."
Whatever phase your marriage is in, it is a miracle. Whether you define the word miracle as supernatural or just crazy good luck, there's something to be said for being with someone whom you love and who loves you. Aren't miracles supposed to be a phenomenon and unexplainable? Perhaps that miracle is contained in that four letter word, l-o-v-e.
Relationships are only as perfect as the people in them. Living together day after day is a challenge. Couples who love and appreciate their partners for who they are, warts and all, and what they bring to the relationship; who stand by each no matter what is going on, have a healthy marriage account.
Giving thanks for the wonderfully, perfect imperfection that makes your marriage a miracle seems quite appropriate now doesn't it?
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© 2011 Kristen Houghton
To read more from Kristen Houghton, peruse her articles at KristenHoughton.com
You may email her at kch@kristenhoughton.com. Read the book critics call "sane and savvy advice for all a must-read," ranked in the top-selling 100 books of 2011 by Tower.com "And Then I'll Be Happy! Stop Sabotaging Your Happiness and Put Your Own Life First."
Her new book, "No Woman Diets Alone - There's Always a Man Behind Her Eating a Doughnut" is due to be released on Kindle December 1, 2011.
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Now let's put sexuality back in but keep it within genders. Lesbian long term relationships undergo lesbian bed death; male homosexual couples keep at it. The classic in-the-closet old spinsters had separate bedrooms, not for show. Women don't share well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/4609018/Women-less-tolerant-of-each-other-than-men-are-study-finds.html
Even with the lowest possible number of roommates/ housemates, i.e. two, women are roughly twice as likely as men to have significant friction, kick each other out twice as often, etc. For three or more women it's virtually impossible, unless one is the big mama house mother.
An apparently fundamental point about successful relationships appears to be underscored by the perspectives of the apparent seminar contact and colleage: successful relationships appear to require a healthy dose of invested time.
The seminar contact appears to suggest that she was blessed with a new overwhelming dose of love when she stopped… being so active and took the time, simply, to notice the man she loved. The story appears to suggest that a simple wink opened a perceived floodgate of positive. The colleague appears to be suggested to have recognized her old love when he felt able to stop… operating outside the bounds of appropriate human experience and return to being the person he was even while negatively impacted by inappropriate stresses.
The apparently preceding Kristen Houghton comment appears to suggest the opinion that neither the seminar guest nor colleague had stopped loving each other. The KH comment appears to not clearly suggest whether the HuffPostThinker comment (to which it appears to refer) was perceived to suggest that either or both had. For clarification, I humbly submit that the HuffPostThinker comment is not intended to suggest that either party had stopped loving its partner.
The intent was to highlight an apparently highly-related, “mission-critical”, yet apparently widely-unrecognized premise that appears to be common to both examples. To wit: humanity appears to be pushing itself too hard. There appears to be a reason why “the demands of life take over and love seems to be put on the back burner so to speak”, and why “We get overwhelmed, we get angry, we exaggerate faults”. An apparently reasonable hypothesis appears to be that humanity appears to have succumbed to a socio-economic philosophy that resources (means to achieving a goal) are more important that relationships (the goal). Apparently, that philosophy appears to have become engrained in majority perspective.
An apparently reasonable potential reason for “going through a dry spell” even “If you truly love someone” appears to be that our culture’s perspective appears to leave insufficient opportunity for that love to be expressed and to have its enriching effect upon relationships. The above-mentioned two examples appear to suggest the salient theory that “all you need to revive your real feelings” might be not “a little push in the memory department”, but rather, an appropriate amount of not pushing in the non-relationship department. Both examples appear to suggest that neither party did anything but stop relentless activity – and each party’s recognition of its love came flooding back. Each party’s memory, therefore, seems to not have needed a push, but rather, to simply stop being pushed away and/or pushed aside.