Marriage: there’s more to the story
When was the last time you told yourself an opportunity story instead of a threat story about your marriage?
My husband and I were engaged for four months before we got married.
He proposed to me in May and we were married in September.
A long engagement felt like torture to both of us. Let’s just do the thing, we thought.
As the day approached, we were both equally excited and equally fearful.
We weren’t afraid of committing to each other or regretting our decision, we were fearful of what came before us.
He grew up with a single mother who never married again after she divorced his dad when he was young.
I grew up with a large family and my parents are still together today, 40 years later.
Marriage, in his eyes, didn’t work.
Marriage, in my eyes, you made work.
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I was married before. To my high school sweetheart. It lasted about five years and we really entered into it thinking it’d last forever.
When it ended, my vision of marriage suffered. It got smaller. It felt less true. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a wife, I thought. Maybe I actually don’t know what I’m doing with this whole marriage thing. Maybe it’s not always supposed to work.
My self-trust was fairly non-existent after that.
How could I get things so wrong?
The church anthem I had grown up believing started swirling in my head again: I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust myself. I can’t trust myself.
And at the same time, hundreds of miles away, my soon-to-be husband was unconsciously reciting his own anthem: I can’t trust commitment. I can’t trust commitment. I can’t trust commitment.
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A lot of false narratives about what marriage was, what it wasn’t, and what it should be stayed ruminating in our heads for years before we met. And then we got together, and marriage felt like something we both wanted. But we were left with solving the large puzzle of how to get these intrusive narratives worked out first.
How could we love each other so deeply and still feel so unsure about what marriage was going to look like for us?
Here were some of the lies we battled with:
My parents marriage didn’t work so neither will mine.
My first marriage ended so I clearly don’t know how to be married.
My marriage will never live up to [fill in the blank]’s marriage, so why even try?
I’m too late. I’ve made too many mistakes. No one will want all of me.
I’m a lone wolf. I’m used to doing everything on my own. I’m better off that way.
I don’t want to get divorced, so I’m just going to stay where I am.
I don’t want to be that vulnerable and susceptible to someone hurting me again.
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There are so many stories we tell ourselves about the potential threats of our behaviors and decisions.
So much of our work has been a reframing of what we want our marriage to look like.
It wasn’t going to look like either of our parents’. It wasn’t going to look like our friends’. It was going to be ours.
And if it was going to be ours, we had to breathe life into it and decide what we were striving for.
Bringing the tainted visions with us wasn’t going to work.
Here’s some of the advice we received during that time that we wrote on a big white board in our house:
Dilute the message we don’t want (someone else’s marriage picture).
What’s the message about our marriage we want reinforced? Affirm and flood our systems with that truth.
Build up our vision. Change our mental + emotional culture (make it everything).
Find those who will anoint the symbols of our marriage.
As long as we stayed bound to the stories we were telling ourselves, and even bound to the people that were reinforcing those stories, we would never be able to live with fidelity to ourselves. We would never be able to imagine anything new.
We would stay among those who’d been hurt or betrayed by marriage. We would stay among those who told us everything it should be and shouldn’t be. And we would stay among those who were handed a version they bought into that works for them.
And no shade to those people. Everyone does the best they can with what they have.
But, ignoring the work we had to do would keep it activated in us — always looking for an exit.
More often than not, the threat responses we were having were telling us something about us, not about marriage.
I recently heard the quote, “Be thankful for your triggers. They let you know where you are not free.”
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We decided that if we wanted a marriage and a family that felt true to us, we would have to work like hell for it. We would have to see it as an opportunity to build what we never had.
It wouldn’t be a road that had been paved before us.
It would be dirt, and rocks, and rough terrain.
It would take us each going into our own minds and resetting our programming.
It would be finding adaptive ways to exist around our triggers.
We have to make the daily choice to live from a default of trust — in one another and in ourselves.
And when our past selves come back into our present day (because they do) — with their fear and with their shame — we have to intentionally go back to that white board and remind ourselves what is true, what is possible, and what is within our control.
There is a real consciousness and responsibility that’s lost when we just default to phrases like, “leave it to God” or “if it’s meant to be, it will be”.
That leaves all of us confused and destabilized when things get hard and require something different of us than we’ve ever given or ever known we were supposed to give.
It requires more from us than we were maybe ever taught or shown — more self-awareness, more patience, more boundaries, more teamwork, more trust.
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Before we got married, we had only lived one side of the story.
The other side of the story is what we’re currently building.
One that brings every part of us and requires more from us. Because that’s what being in true relationship is all about. It’s unraveling the threats, the hurt, the fear, and the unknown together.
We’re not perfect. At all. We’re still learning as we go — making mistakes, pissing each other off, learning to be soft when we want to stay hard.
But, at the same time, we get to help each other rebuild and reshape the version of marriage we always wanted to have, but didn’t know was possible.
And I think that’s the beauty of story. It’s always in process. A never-ending, unceasing journey of uncovering more that deserves to be told.
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One of my favorite pastors said, “we can get stuck in an isolated narrative where we only see one half of what is true. Because of the pain that we’re experiencing and the trauma that comes with the pain, our perception and our perspective is held captive. And we become imprisoned with our pain because the narrative has been isolated.
But there’s more to the story…”
There’s always more to the story.
