Asstastic Blog the Whole Family Can Enjoy
Dude! (I did that in my best Hurley impersonation, which you know if you watch Lost. If you don’t—and I say, Why not?!—I guess you could substitute Keanu Reeves. I believe there are major differences in delivery, but I digress...) Did Tom call me a dumb ass in his last entry? I thought so.
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I have been trying very hard not to comment on Tom’s current state of affairs. I care about him as a friend, but honestly I have been trying not to say anything. It pains me that he seems to be going through a rough time, but I don’t know what it’s like. I am happily married and have never known anyone close to me who got a divorce. I don’t want to comment personally, but I will generally. Not as an expert, but as a fellow traveler.
As a society we seem to put little emphasis on staying married. We prepare for the wedding for months, even years, but do very little to prepare for the marriage. We have all heard about the 60 percent divorce rate, which now seems like a perfect pretext when things don’t go as planned. Obviously, a larger percentage of people don’t realize that you have to work hard at having a happy marriage. That’s not to say that there aren’t easy times. But it definitely takes some pruning, much like a garden. It’s easy to end up with lots of weeds and flowers that have gone to seed.
It’s wonderful to analyze yourself and question what you could do better. It’s great to try to change your lifestyle. But you are who you are and a marriage is built around two people. It takes two people working together. As the french author Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
You could run and run and never catch someone who is ahead of you. If she has already taken off, she must slow down or stop for you to reach her. Treating her nicely, thinking of her, and showing her you care will hopefully slow her down. But then you must work together at traveling similar paths at the same speed.
That is the difficult part.
I’ve never been good at math and those “If Train A leaves the station at x time, while Train B leaves at...” problems were hell for a right-brain thinker like me. But I know that you must be at the same pace. Life pulls us so many different directions at so many times in our lives. The marriage you have when you get married will never be the one you have in 6 months, 10 years, or 50 years. And it probably shouldn’t be, because we all should grow.
But like a garden, there are needs of all the flowers. There are more aggressive plants that hog the sunlight, there are weeds, there are temptations (as in Eden)—all of which we must prune. One beautiful, unselfish, and well-counseled flower does not make a beautiful garden.
That is the difficult part.
------------
I have been trying very hard not to comment on Tom’s current state of affairs. I care about him as a friend, but honestly I have been trying not to say anything. It pains me that he seems to be going through a rough time, but I don’t know what it’s like. I am happily married and have never known anyone close to me who got a divorce. I don’t want to comment personally, but I will generally. Not as an expert, but as a fellow traveler.
As a society we seem to put little emphasis on staying married. We prepare for the wedding for months, even years, but do very little to prepare for the marriage. We have all heard about the 60 percent divorce rate, which now seems like a perfect pretext when things don’t go as planned. Obviously, a larger percentage of people don’t realize that you have to work hard at having a happy marriage. That’s not to say that there aren’t easy times. But it definitely takes some pruning, much like a garden. It’s easy to end up with lots of weeds and flowers that have gone to seed.
It’s wonderful to analyze yourself and question what you could do better. It’s great to try to change your lifestyle. But you are who you are and a marriage is built around two people. It takes two people working together. As the french author Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
You could run and run and never catch someone who is ahead of you. If she has already taken off, she must slow down or stop for you to reach her. Treating her nicely, thinking of her, and showing her you care will hopefully slow her down. But then you must work together at traveling similar paths at the same speed.
That is the difficult part.
I’ve never been good at math and those “If Train A leaves the station at x time, while Train B leaves at...” problems were hell for a right-brain thinker like me. But I know that you must be at the same pace. Life pulls us so many different directions at so many times in our lives. The marriage you have when you get married will never be the one you have in 6 months, 10 years, or 50 years. And it probably shouldn’t be, because we all should grow.
But like a garden, there are needs of all the flowers. There are more aggressive plants that hog the sunlight, there are weeds, there are temptations (as in Eden)—all of which we must prune. One beautiful, unselfish, and well-counseled flower does not make a beautiful garden.
That is the difficult part.
posted by Kel | 12:04 PM
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