Took me 4 years to Write a Marriage Post

I haven’t written much about love since getting married. Not because of a lack of its presence in my life; more because there is so much, and it is so utterly sufficient. The feelings of angst and pining are gone, and the fit is right. Not too tight or too loose; room for us each to learn and change and grow (as all humans need to do) without sustained pressure on painful points, but at the same time intertwined enough to feel secure. Safe. Anchored. Sometimes there’s discomfort in an adjustment here or there, but then that is what we do—continue adjusting until we reach mutual comfort. Which is what every healthy relationship does. What else is there to say, and how interesting to outside parties could it possibly be? As Tolstoy famously said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That’s not to say life in general is perfect, or that marriage hasn’t been a learning process. My husband and I have said several times to one another that we love each other more and are happier together now even than when we first got married, which is evidence of the growth we have done both individually and as a couple.

How did that happen? I think when people read marriage-type posts from married people, especially people they know identify as “Christian”, there are certain themes they expect to be present. And, because some of my most significant areas of growth and joy in marriage don’t have a ton to do with those themes, I considered not writing a marriage-type post at all. It wouldn’t necessarily encourage other couples to “live sacrificially” (though self-sacrifice definitely has its place) or constantly “die to themselves”. It wouldn’t talk about how it’s so worth it to me to give up certain passions or parts of my personality for the sake of “peace in the home”. It wouldn’t read like a gym membership testimonial, convincing readers through a tight smile that the daily exhaustion and burning pain is really awesome if you think about it cause it’s really just so good for you in the long run, you know?

Being happier together and more in love four years after our wedding day than even than we were in the weeks and months following it was not something we expected. Mostly, we had heard that marriage is hard. That it’s work. “It’s not supposed to make you happy; it’s supposed to make you holy.” That the honeymoon doesn’t last; that it only goes downhill from the moment you say “I Do”. No one told us that it could get better. Like, way better. That it’s only “hard” in the sense that anything in life that’s rewarding, worth doing well, and takes some practice is “hard”. That between the times of work, it’s FUN. That it can be sanctifying AND bring happiness.

No one told us it could be this good. I understand the desire to prepare new couples for marriage by telling them, “Marriage can be difficult; don’t give up at the first bumps in the road.” But the near-constant emphasis on the “difficult” point created an incredible amount of anxiety. I wish there had been more voices saying, “This is good. This is edifying. This is fulfilling and rewarding and fun and comforting. Every close relationship has its conflicts but you can work those out. You can. You’ll be fine. This is not a trap. It’s not a trick question. Go forth and be happy together.”
Realizing that a long-term commitment can be (and STAY) wonderful changed my approach to that “work” they talk about in marriage (that work that is present in any art or skill one hopes to become proficient in). At first, I did that work out of fear. Trying to stave off that seemingly inevitable time when we would (apparently) get bored with one another, resent each other, feel as if simply the act of being kind and faithful to one another was so difficult it was deserving of sainthood. Maybe if I did everything right, maybe if we worked really hard right from the beginning, we could hold that off as long as possible.

Now that I’ve experienced the phenomenon of our relationship getting even better four years into marriage, I approach that work differently. Now it’s not frantic. Now it’s not about avoiding being stuck in misery. Now it feels more like tending to a long-term art project or a bonsai tree: continuing to sculpt, perfect, and customize this beautiful thing we have together as time goes on and life happens.
The work itself has changed a bit too.

As a woman in the Evangelical church, essentially I was taught that I needed to conform myself to a husband’s every preference. If he prefers long hair over short, obviously I should keep my hair long. If certain outfits aren’t his preference, of course I shouldn’t wear them. And a tattoo or a piercing he wasn’t absolutely in love with? That would be utter, callous betrayal of any claim I’d ever made to care about his feelings.

I was taught to be easy, agreeable, passive; opinionated only when my opinion aligned with his.
Any individuality I had would be subject to sacrifice, if my husband found it distasteful. This was my moral duty as a wife, and if I failed, who could blame a husband for “looking elsewhere”, or no longer caring to spend quality time with me, or any number of things?

Now, anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I have an extremely difficult time suppressing my…individuality. Earlier in life—early in marriage—I attributed this to a lack of self-control on my part. My efforts to repress so much of what made me “me”—trying to fit myself as much as I could into that “good Christian wife” mold—caused me so much anxiety.

But I was blessed to marry a man who has no desire to control me or suppress my individuality, and over time and talking that finally sunk in. Little by little, I came more into myself, and as he continued to accept what I showed him, my anxiety lessened. I became more assertive. And our bond grew stronger.
I’m married to someone who sees the value in letting their spouse be fully who they are instead of trying to force them into a certain mold or tame their growth, and that’s allowed me to continually embrace the call to my authentic self with freedom and joy.

I no longer see my inability to conform—or the anxiety I felt when I tried—as a personality flaw, like I’d always assumed it was. Now I see that I was made to be this person, and that fully embracing who I am is not only ok; it is a celebration of who God made me to be. My journey of self-acceptance has had many facets and detours, many allies and saboteurs. But being married to someone who loves me because of—not in spite of—who I am, even as I change and grow as a person, has been utterly key and incredibly healing.

But in order for him to know, understand, and love who I am, I needed to explain myself at times. Growing in assertiveness—not simply ceding my every preference to his because that’s what a good wife does—was necessary for me.

Of course, my acceptance of him is equally vital. He’s a compassionate, empathetic, intelligent, hard-working man who is so wonderful in dealing with the challenges of having a chronically ill spouse, so he makes it pretty easy.

We don’t agree on everything all the time, and it’s been important for us to realize that that’s ok. At times we’ve had different opinions, different beliefs, different preferences. But we’ve learned to respect one another’s emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical autonomy.

Allowing one another to be individuals—not only allowing it but enthusiastically supporting it—has been invaluable for the happiness of our marriage; for our ability to thrive and enjoy life with one another.

There’s a lot more I could say about generally healthy marriage advice. But the realization of the importance of individuality and autonomy (having those things, and having them be fully supported by one’s spouse) was such a surprise to me after what I was taught that that’s what I thought was worth writing about. The other stuff you can find elsewhere. The Gottman Institute, founded by Drs. Julie and John Gottman, is an amazing resource for many different kinds of relationships (but especially those of the long-term romantic variety). Also never be afraid to meet with a therapist a time or two. They’re experts in human thought and emotion; it just makes sense to consult an expert if things start to feel tangled up.

So yeah. I guess if you want to feel like you’re married to your best friend, treat your spouse like your best friend. A whole, fun, quirky, flawed, amazing, beautifully imperfect human being who you make dumb jokes with and tell your thoughts to and try your best not to hurt and have no compulsion to control or manipulate. You’re not responsible for them nor they for you, but you both ask for help when you need it and you gladly provide it to one another. Don’t be stingy with empathy and fondness, and don’t forget that you matter, too. Anticipate joy together. It’s totally accessible.

This is not a trap.
It’s not a trick question.
You can do this.
Go forth and be happy together.
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Spirit Crumbs

I ran away from home once. I was eleven years old, maybe twelve. I had everything I needed; my Labrador puppy and a fishing pole. A paper bag of dog food; Best Choice pepperonis for bait (the catfish—the big ones—they can smell it in the water).
I wanted stories to tell, and I thought that those were only to be found away from home. So I left. My optimistic sense of adventure only lasted while my internal compass remained magnetized. Not toward true North; I knew where that was, but toward Home. How the two might be related escaped me; I assumed I’d always know that Home was That Way.
Home, where my dad was mowing the lawn and my mom was planting flowers and my brother was practicing his classical guitar exercises. Where the dogs were, and the cats; I couldn't bring them all with me, could I? After all, there were nine of them.

My room too, was at home, with its jungle wallpaper and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Mosquito net over my bed, tiger posters, photographs. All sorts of things I didn't think about missing when I took off into the woods. Because I was eleven—maybe twelve—years old with pigtail braids, cargo pants with pockets full of trinkets; a pocket knife, a puppy and a fishing pole. And I'd caught seven catfish that summer. Big ones, too. I'd be ok.

My internal compass only lasted a couple of hours. The woods can be confusing, and all the grain silos in the distance look the same. I realized I didn't know where Home was, and suddenly I was desperate to get back. I knew north and south, but was Home north or south of me? I began to panic. My puppy was tired; I carried him, my fishing pole dragging behind me, hooked to the belt loop of my Old Navy cargo pants. Terrified I had actually achieved my goal of leaving Home behind, I barreled through the brush in the direction I was pretty sure I'd come from. Head down, braids torn, tears gumming my eyelashes, I shielded my puppy with my arms as I burst through the edge of the tree line. Blinking in the sun, I could just make out the silhouette of my dad waving to me from the riding mower in our back yard. I lifted a hand, waved back. I guess I found my way; I guess I never got that far. I thought I’d gone so far.

I wish I could tell my younger self to be patient. There will be so many stories. You are living them right now, even though you don't realize it. You don't need to leave—even though you will, eventually—to find them. Life will happen. You don't need to rush it. It happens too fast as it is most times. 

Still though, there's something to be said for making your own stories on purpose, I think.

Memories like this are important to me when the exhaustion—the complacency—of adulthood and its struggles (some universal, some unique to me) set in. I sought adventure once. I was not deterred by discomfort or inconvenience, if the result was an experience. A memory. Something more than the average; the day-to-day. It's been a tired few years, and there are other, more responsible things I should probably be focusing on, but I'm not ready to give that part of myself up. I'm not ready to stop risking; suffering consequences for the gain of a life that feels fully lived. I don't know yet what form that can take from here, but I know that it has to be something. Home is important; Home is essential. I need it, like I didn’t think I ever would (and I’m not sure how to feel about that; I wanted to be able to be nomadic and maybe once I would have been but I’m so tired so often now). But without some adventurous pursuit, I stagnate. I lose myself. I get bored. I stop doing anything interesting or productive and I buy too many different shades of lipstick.

I need adventure in the great wide somewhere.
 
But I know there are stories to be told from Home, too. Stories I lived when I didn't know I was living them. Hopefully in ten years I’ll be able to look back and say the same of now. I need to make more of them happen around here. Little things, but story-things still, when I can. It’s hard to do though when I’m dealing with a certain level of exhaustion almost constantly.

If you were to uproot all the trees in the woods of my childhood home, you would unearth many time capsules; little pieces of who I was then. Seeds of who I still am. Spirit-crumbs. Well-sealed, as best as I knew how between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Some were intended to be time capsules specifically—pages torn from diaries, song lyrics, photographs, baubles and perfume samples; things I felt represented the essence of myself at a particular period of time all sealed up in a mason jar with rubber cement and duct tape. Some things I buried as casualties of the war between my strong will and my people-pleasing tendencies. What was I to do when I was enraptured by the story of a Manga series I knew I would be taken away once it was discovered that a panel or two included nudity? By the time I stumbled upon the first slip of a cartoon nipple in book number four, I was deeply invested in these characters and their fate. I finished the volume, sneaked it out to the woods wrapped tightly in plastic and tape, and I buried it on the far side of the creek. I did this with each volume remaining in the series the moment I finished them, all bought with my hard-earned allowance. With each book I buried in the woods I fell further in love with the story, and further into the resignation that I was who I was and I loved what I loved—no matter how I fought it. No matter how badly I wanted to be “good”.

After years of doubt, guilt, and self-loathing, followed by years of desperate searching, praying, broken hallelujahs and begging for acceptance that was right there where I left it—where I’d been convinced by fundamentalism to lay it down as if I didn’t deserve it—I finally realized that I didn’t have to choose between being “good” and being who God made me to be. There was the redemption I needed and the redemption I only thought I did—eventually, mercifully, I found both.
Fourteen books are buried on the banks of Pony Creek. Fourteen books and two burned CDs; a mason jar full of letters, a t-shirt, a broken laptop computer.

I’ve hidden things elsewhere too; written prayers tucked beneath the pulpit of Weatherby Chapel, little paintings beneath highway bridges, a ring I don’t remember where, messages in bottles, notes in library books. Leaving a trail of myself; more spirit-crumbs. Why this type of preservation is important to some deep-seated part of me, I don’t know.

I used to think it was just because I felt the need to document; because I had fear of forgetting. A fear of all this—all I’ve been and all I am—being lost one day to a history so much bigger than me. All these moments just passing and disappearing into the inaccessible past with nothing material to give testimony to their occurrence. Maybe it is that, some. I write too, things I don’t leave behind. I have a bookshelf with over 50 completed journals in my bedroom, all filled with the bore of one unremarkable woman’s growing-up. Maybe I’m afraid of the forgetting, but I also have an overwhelming urge to drizzle my soul out, that it might be fully realized and understood—at least by me.

I think there’s more too, though. I think I need to live a story. I think I need to live things to write later, to remember, to tell.

I’ve lost track of that lately, and without it I feel aimless. Meaningless. I’ve gotten trapped in the everyday, the practical, worrying only about how to streamline necessities. Without something to live towards that reminds me--to my very bones--who I am and what I am; some adventure to revive my wild, primordial soul...that goal in itself feels empty.

I remember when I ran barefoot on the beach in La Jolla at night. I was only there for a week, and at first I tried my tennis shoes but they sunk so deep in the sand. I timed it every night, forty-five minutes of jogging on that color-sapped strip of beach out behind the hotel so I wouldn’t get fat on vacation. I ran the stretch of darkness between one dock lamp and the next; how they seemed to grow ever further away from me as I ran toward them. Somehow I reached them each time, back and forth again, afraid to step beyond the far halos of light as if some Cthulhus waited beyond, one on the other side of each circle. I ran back and forth between the two, their imaginary tentacles bouncing me back and forth like a ping-pong ball; so hollow and light compared to the roaring, invisibly dark ocean on one side of me and vibrant expanse of California on the other.

Had women made up the old myths, Poseidon surely would have been female. What else is the ocean more like than a womb, with thriving life inside? A womb that incubated the beginnings of all life billions of years ago before the first venturing of an organism out onto dry land. The ocean is Mother Nature's womb and if it has a ruler, it's a queen.

Small and white, insignificant, I’d return to the hotel room and rinse the sand from my feet but I haven’t forgotten the feeling.

The feeling of being such a little thing, with its little agenda, scuttling on the sand by the void of darkness hovering above the roiling black sea. Small as I knew myself to be, I felt I was on the edge of adventure—of a story—and that was enough for me.

In a few months I’ll see the sea again, and I know it will feel as if I’m coming home, like it does every time. I was not meant to be landlocked; I was not meant to feel quite so safe—unchallenged, unperturbed, uninspired.

I need to do things worth writing about; worth remembering. To live a life that teaches me something, hands-on.

There’s an abandoned house nearby that I’ve been meaning to explore with my camera in-hand. I’ve been waiting for someone to come along with me but maybe I’ll just go alone. That may be adventure enough for now, though nearly every day I think of Burning Man.
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Memoirs of a Disorder

I am sixteen, and they tell me I’m obsessed. All I want is to be dust-small, paper thin. I’m not and yet my edges still seem to cut people. My mother cries sometimes.

I am sixteen I envy the mushrooms in the yard; they thrive on the leftovers of life. I try to eat the leftovers in the fridge, but bite by bite I spit them out into the toilet. I do not thrive.

I am sixteen and I feel the cold gnawing at the bottom of my stomach and I hate it and I love it; I love it because I hate it, and it’s me who gets to decide. I’m sixteen and the power of self-denial is intoxicating. I deny the gnawing for so long that I stop feeling it. I have conquered.

I am sixteen and I run. I run six miles every day. I get shin splints. I run. I get a stress fracture. I run. I wheeze and cough and cry. I run. I love that with each step I am burning myself down and down, each day occupying slightly less space than the day before. I am in control. I run.

I am sixteen and I am so tired.

“Do something nice for the part of your body you hate the most.” My counselor says. “Make it feel pretty.” So I get my navel pierced and wait to like my stomach better. I suppose it helps a little.

I am sixteen and I have gone 60 days without anything sweet. On day 61 I eat the hard, creamy chocolate guilt. I feel sick. I eat more. On day 62 I hate myself, and all I eat is some lettuce with red wine vinegar, and then only because my mother is watching.

I am sixteen and my brother makes me half of a sandwich when he sees I did not eat lunch. Usually content not to confront me, even he is moved to action by the way my bones poke up under my skin. “Please eat it.” He begs. “You need to eat.” It is so sweet of him that I eat a few bites, but when he leaves I give the rest to the dogs. They follow me around a lot now; I am always giving them food. They leave no evidence. Nothing in the trash for my dad to find when he empties it; nothing to clog the toilet. I am sixteen and I have learned these things; I have become clever in the ways of secret self-destruction.

I am sixteen at a potluck at church, holding a bowl of soup in my shaky hands. “Look, she’s eating something!” I hear the whisper a few seats down the table. I ignore the comment. I weigh ninety pounds and still I pretend that no one can tell I have a problem.

I’m seventeen and I stop running. I’m too tired. I gain weight. Isn’t that recovery? It feels like failure. But I am so tired. It happens. I cannot stop it any longer. I close my mind’s eyes shut tight; grit my teeth and let myself grow.

I am seventeen and I begin liking little stories; stories about how people woke up and made it through the day. What they thought about, besides what they craved and what they denied themselves; besides unattainable goals and forbidden things. I like stories where things are ok. Not all the time, maybe, and not exceedingly happy, but mostly ok.

I am eighteen and I am ok. Not all the time, and not exceedingly happy, but mostly ok. I throw away the jeans I’ve grown out of. I know that I will never fit into them again, so why let them take up the space? My counselor calls it acceptance. It feels more like surrender. I gain more weight than I would like, but I am ok.

I am nineteen and it is a rock in the back of my brain—a constant, subtle weight—it is white noise in the background of my whole life. But I am able to ignore it now, and that is more freedom than I’ve had in a few years. I live.

I am nineteen and I feel I am coming up out of the ground, breaking the surface after years of tunneling. The light is bright and disorienting. I am confused by the freedom, the wide open spaces; the choices that are mine—that have always been mine but I thought they weren’t. Taking them back makes me nervous. What do I do with them now? My reference points are dismantled after years of crashing back and forth between gluttony and starvation; I must re-learn them. I must re-learn how to eat. It is clumsy. Usually it takes conscious thought, but sometimes it takes no thought at all. Sometimes it is smooth sailing; sometimes it is an equation to solve.

I am nineteen and the equations grow easier, in time. Not because they have become any more simple, but because I’ve improved my psychological algebra. I miss when one plus one was two and I never had to solve for X, but at least I’ve learned how. Maybe algebra is what it takes to thrive.

I am twenty and I solve for X and I move on and I live.

I am twenty-one and it is a thorn buried deep in the sole of my shoe. Most of the time I can barely feel it; only sometimes when I step just right.

I am twenty-one, and I step carefully.

I am twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. I live. I solve for X.

I'm twenty-five, twenty-six. Medications make me pack on pounds and I try to breathe; I use the tools I've learned. I focus on nurturing my body; I look up body-positive blogs on the internet. Sometimes disgusted, sometimes content, never thrilled, but I live. I dig into my unique self. I solve for X.

Twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight and I'm always trying to lose weight. I barely remember a time when I wasn't, whether or not I "needed to". Technically overweight now (my teenaged self would simply die), diets and calculations are surely more justified. Fat women must always be self-punishing by way of depravation; nothing disordered about that.
But I follow my body-positive blogs, and I believe my husband when he tells me he thinks I'm beautiful. I take fashion risks I never would have three years ago, and it's fun. I have tattoos I designed myself; I wear the sparkly things I used to be embarrassed to love so much.

I solve for X. I will always solve for X, I think. But I live.

I live.