Love is a verb. Marriage is a growth opportunity; we won’t get the growth if we give up when the going gets tough. Everything will be all right in the end, if it is not all right, it shouldn’t yet be the end.

Everything will be all right in the end, if it is not all right, it shouldn't yet be the end. Love is a verb. Marriage is a growth opportunity; we won't get the growth if we give up when the going gets tough.

Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas

A happy man marries the woman he loves; a happier man loves the woman he married.  Susan Douglas                                     

 I sit here a day before my wedding anniversary thinking of the wonderful husband, and children I have been blessed with. No matter what else in life we accomplish bringing a life into the world at times seems like the smallest and biggest accomplishment.

As mothers, we felt if we worked outside the home we neglected our children. If we stayed inside the home we sometimes felt we neglected our self. We let down the sisterhood who fought for emancipation and women’s rights. At my vantage point, I believe the fight was for choice. We need to find balance in our lives. Balancing our hopes and dreams with responsibilities isn’t always easy. There is a price for everything when we make one choice we eliminate another. Our children and families can’t be the most important thing in our lives if we don’t make time for them. We give our time to what we feel is important.

When my mother was widowed at twenty-five with two children and a new baby she was told to give up the baby and build a life. She said, “My children are my life.” This, the truest statement of motherhood is still true today.

Once our children are grown we may appreciate them even more. Seeing them take their place in the world, get married, and start their own families is bittersweet. We see them as we once were, the young couple with stars in our eyes, hope in our heart, and dreams to make come true. Now we know how a lot of that turned out, often keeping body and soul together, and raising children took up most of our lives, energy, and resources. We were busy, happy, seeing progress in ours and our children’s lives.

When our children get married it really punctuates we have moved into a new role. We don’t love our new role yet. We don’t have grandchildren to love, teach, and see the world through their eyes.  It will be an adventure being grandparents. No pressure kids, but can’t you please hurry up?

My daughter and her husband attended a wedding yesterday in The Dominican Republic. Another family is formed, the hopes and dreams of another couple going forth into the world to build a life, and maybe a family.

We rally around as another family is formed. I smile at the hope and joy shining from the faces of brides and grooms at their weddings.  I say a silent prayer hoping that love will still be shining in the years to come. It’s never about the day, no matter how extravagant and beautiful. It is always about the relationship. It is about bringing our best self to the marriage and bringing out the best in someone else.  The magic of marriage is it transforms two people into a couple. If it is a positive marriage all of society benefits, the chemistry and compatibility evident over the years.

Freud said, “It’s a cornerstone of our humanity; only love protects us enough to grow and change.” Love is a verb and if we think of it as something we do instead of something we find, or fall into it has a better chance of standing the test of time. Building a life together that has meaning, with an ability to laugh at life’s challenges and obstacles, and a willingness to get through the tough times and know this too shall pass is what is required. The highs will pass and the lows will pass, but there is another high coming and another low. We need to learn to surf the highs and lows to enjoy our marriage. It’s a wild ride and if we are in it for the long haul it is both beautiful and the biggest growth opportunity of our life.

Marriage is I believe the cornerstone of society. I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been bringing up our two children without my husband’s love and support. As a shared goal raising children is one of the best. Not a goal that will fix a marriage. Raising children is a stressful endeavor. The accomplishment like any difficult challenge is rewarding. We watch our children take their place in the world, and we know their accomplishments aren’t ours, but we feel pride.

Kalil Gibran said, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”

The advice I’ve written in wedding cards over the years is; marry the right person and be the right person. If we want our marriage to work we need to look for the best in each other. If we spend our time looking at our partner’s shortcomings, we will find them, if we look for their good points we will find them also. The lens we look through makes all the difference. It is as easy to recount our partner’s good points as their bad. Expecting better instead of worse often gives us better. We get what we expect.

Nobody knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Sometimes we don’t even know what is going on in our own. The reason is that we aren’t always straight forward in our communication. Kalil Gibran said, “Between what is said and not meant and what is meant and not said, all love is lost.” It is easy to fall into this trap, and it can be as hard to take back unsaid things as said things. But, if we truly want better communication sometimes we have to say it. “I don’t think you understand what I meant, or what I said. I apologize for not being a better communicator, I love you, I value you, I don’t understand you but I appreciate you and am happy that we are on this journey together. I’m in for the long haul, the ups, the downs, the good, the bad, the funny, and the sad.”

In our marriages, the two of us may not have the same dreams and aspirations but everything that is good for one of us should be good for both of us. Sometimes it may be time for the wife to shine; sometimes it may be time for the husband to shine. If we have each other’s backs and give each other enduring support and encouragement we can’t help but be in the world feeling lifted up. As Dr. Phil says “Marriage is a safe place to fall.” Relaxing in our husband’s or wife’s arms after a good or bad day feels better than being alone in our joy or sorrow. Some people talk about chemistry as though sex is the most important part of marriage. If we have good sex it’s five percent of the marriage and if we have bad or no sex it might become ninety percent of the marriage. So as Nike says, “just do it.” Then we can get on with building a marriage.

After thirty-three years of marriage, I believe it is not lack of love, but lack of friendship that makes an unhappy marriage. After all, we spend more time talking and being together than anything else. If we can’t ask our husband or wife out for coffee or ice cream and not spend all our time on our cell phone it might not bode well for our marriage. If we want a better marriage we should have more coffee, ice-cream, long walks or drives in the country. Too often we focus on the big things, but if we want a better life we should enjoy more of the little things. That’s where the magic is. I said to my husband the other day as we sat in Second Cup. Even if we travel the world it’s still just the two of us over coffee whether in Milan, Paris, Singapore, or the coffee shop down the street

Where ever we go there we are. If it isn’t good between us it doesn’t matter if it’s a place on our bucket list or Tim Horton’s down the street.

Sometimes I think we forget what marriage is. It’s just two people sharing a life. It’s better when it’s a happy life, but that is where the choice lies. We can be happy or we can be unhappy that is our decision. To make happiness our goal is a good way to be unhappy.  If we make meaning our choice it is much easier to pursue meaning than to pursue happiness.  We might not be happy putting our children’s needs ahead of our own but it’s meaningful and something we will be proud of over the years. Every day we can move forward in pleasure and purpose, there is a lot to savor, food, conversation, laughter, sex, and companionship.

Isn’t marriage worth the time and effort needed to keep it interesting, fun, and progressing?  Do some of us get out of a marriage to look for another one when we probably could have worked on the old one? Is it that different from moving from one house we’ve let run down to a new house, which will eventually run down if we don’t maintain it?

A happy marriage is about three things: memories of togetherness, forgiveness of mistakes, and a promise to never give up on each other. Surabhi Surendra

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you will come back and read some more. Have a blessed day filled with gratitude, purpose, and love.

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Love Is A Verb – 30 Days To Improving Your Relationship Communication: Learn How To Nurture A Deeper Love By Mastering The Art of Heart-To-Heart Relationship Communication Paperback – Sep 28 2014

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Crisis and Opportunity. Finding our way through the hard times. There will always be hard times.

2019 A Year Of Possibilities - photo of coral rose by Belynda Wilson Thomas

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Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons we didn’t think we needed to know. Unknown

Out of crisis comes opportunity. Not opportunity at first sight we want. The loss of a job may propel us in a direction we would never have taken without that push.

A health crisis may jar us from our life of complacency. We are not living our best life as we don’t notice the status quo is no longer good enough. We are slow to change when “is this all there is,” may flitter across our brain from time to time. It doesn’t have the impact of the full blown crisis to move us out of our comfort zone.

We are no longer comfortable, we can’t ignore the crisis. The elephant in the living room is charging at us. We need to figure stuff out. We can no longer just pick up the doo doo and pretend its household dust.

Something has to be done. If we lose our job in a dying industry perhaps we are the lucky one. We can be out looking for work before everyone else. A marriage crisis can blindside us, but many people who work through them say their marriage is better, stronger for going through it. Even in the cases of infidelity, many of us think – how could we get through that?

A relationship is like a house. When a lightbuld burns out you do not go and buy a new house, you fix the light bulb. Unknown

Books are written about people who have. They tell us what doesn’t kill us makes us strong. We should become strong in the broken places. These sound like platitudes but I am willing to bet that most long marriages have had to adjust at times to a crisis perhaps not as dire as infidelity.

Infidelity may not even be the toughest to overcome. With infidelity you know what the problem is. You can leave, live with it, or you can find a way to rebuild. When it isn’t anything as defined as that, what do we do? We often leave it to disintegrate. My mother says, “there’s nothing as dead as old cold love.”

Sometimes it seems old and cold but there are embers there that can be fanned back into a flame. Happily ever after is only in fairy tales. I know people who confided they had some of their best times after their marital crisis.

I believe it. We go through the five stages of love over and over again or we stop at stage three where we notice the flaws, insecurities, weaknesses, and fall victim to the unmet expectations we have of our partners and they have of us. Our partner is not responsible for not being the person we thought they were. They are who they are, flawed, imperfect, sometimes damaged (whatever that means).

A phrase I’m hearing a lot of men using on Utube – talking about damaged women.  Some of these men are advocating looking for a wife in Countries that are not in the West. They feel that is where the “real women are.” I believe they are in for some serious disillusionment. Those are real women just like the ones in the West and those marriages are as prone to the spectre of unmet expectations as the rest of us.

It is our unmet expectations we put on someone else we need to deal with. It isn’t for the person who can’t meet our expectations to meet them. We have to deal with the reality of the situation. Many of us run, we are into our third marriage wondering why there is always something wrong with the man or woman we have chosen. At some point we have to realise we married who we married, flaws and all. Their flaws aren’t probably worse than other flaws people have we are attracted to.

I’ve seen people appear to marry the same person over and over again. They look different but they are very similar in character and the relationship challenges they bring. Leaving the marriage is like leaving the lesson behind we have to learn. We can learn it with the first person, third person or maybe we choose never to learn it. That would be the waste of a life.

We all have flaws, no one is perfect. You can’t leave your partner and not have stuff to deal with. It will be different stuff. I think it is better to deal with what is, than look for the fantasy partner that doesn’t exist.

You complete me, I’ll always love you, love is never having to say you’re sorry. These are some of the lies that lead to unmet expectations. Love is under there, sometimes we have to do some excavation to find it. Love is a verb. Through are actions we can convey we do care, we do want to find a way through. Our commitment is still strong, if strained. We can learn to love ourselves and each other, warts and all.

Does it make sense to leave a good relationship for a few faults? To leave good, trying to get perfect? Perfect doesn’t exist. Perfection is enemy of the good.

If you don’t stay together through the bad then you won’t be together for the good. Unknown

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