"Just Do It" Valentine's Day (LINK-UP)

  

Just do it.

Surprise yourself.
If you prefer jeans and a sweatshirt, try a little harder and put on more dressy duds.
Pass on the ponytail; do your hair.
Put some make-up to good use, if you use it at all.
Think about the good things -- what made love grow.
Smile.
Pick a few of those things and repeat them.

And, as the title of this blog suggests -- go out on a limb!

The saying reads, "Go out on a limb. That is where the fruit is!"  Both in nature and in life, if you miss the opportunity to try the climb, overcome your fear and get out on the limb where the fruit actually grows, you'll miss something big.  Bountiful harvest, or any harvest at all.  Blessings, joy, contentment, success ... love.  You don't want to leave them hanging, wasted, or for someone else to enjoy, when God grew them there just for you.  He has so much in store for you, if you will only throw off the weight of your old thoughts and try on some new ones.

Make today, Valentine's Day 2013, the day you climb out on that limb and reach for the fruit.  Bless your marriage with your efforts.  Plant seeds of love today, and trust in the Gardener to work on you, to nurture and care for you as you grow toward the light.

Happy Valentine's Day!


In case you missed them, more on this love-growing thing:

Ladies Before Gentlemen:  Making Marriage Changes
Perfect Submission?
Real Marriage Done Right:  Respect and Love
Ten Ways to Love:  Give without Sparing
Your Wifely Approval Rating

<div align="center"><a href="http://www.out-ona-limb.blogspot.com" title="Out on a Limb" target="_blank"><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-n29f61sTp1Q/UPbeoumwNwI/AAAAAAAAAN8/XA85_8dBbbU/s128/Thursday.jpg" alt="Out on a Limb" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Comparison Is the Thief of Joy

"Comparison is the thief of joy," a quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, covers a lot of space.  Whether applied to physical shape, home, lifestyle, marriage, children, job, vacation plans or distance traveled in a faith walk, people of all ages, races and social status compare themselves to their fellow men and commence lining it all up in specific and exacting order, then measuring ... comparing.  The tools each person uses for measuring differ, but all share something: the stressful feeling stemming from our inability to measure up.

The human race seems compelled to compare everything.

Enter Valentine's Day.

My husband and I will exchange cards.  Always do.  We may each have a gift tucked away fro the other, but not always.  We "don't celebrate" Valentine's Day ... officially ... kind of ... in a way.  We don't ever miss the card exchange.
Confusing, isn't it?

 It has to do with not wanting to disappoint each other, I think.  A little dose of loving words (shared by a few thousand other couples) never hurts, and the gesture alone feels right.  We set out to card shop with the nature of our relationship in mind.  We choose a card with love in our hearts, not with pressure to perform in our brains.  Big difference!

As always, we will enjoy a home-grilled steak dinner and Red Velvet cake, and add support to the four pillars of marriage: the intellectual, the spiritual, the emotional and the physical aspects of our relationship.

Ta-dahhhh!  This completes our Valentine's Day. It serves as plenty of celebration for us, not to mention we will have leftover cake. And when anyone asks about it, I happily note it was just what we wanted. 'Cause it always is just that.

Once upon a time, I felt envious of "Valentine Propaganda" -- those tokens of love advertised as the end-all, be-all of love.   I believed the deception that a truly loving husband would cover all or most of those bases, like a Love Checklist. I ached for a bouquet of flowers at my desk and for a surprise drive to a special restaurant or ... something.  I focused my Valentine thoughts through a filter of the world's expectations and through the advertisement of what love looks like, materially.

Love does not look like flowers, candy, food or dress-up clothes.  Love does not look like lingerie or talking greeting cards.  Love looks like a million things that no one person can list, and that no one can measure.  Love, in each of our hearts, feels unique.  It reflects our individuality.  It cannot measure up to a relative's or friend's brand of it.  It doesn't match the advertisement for a local jewelry store or candy shop.

Love looks like your first date, your first kiss, every date you shared before you engaged for marriage.  Love looks like your wedding day full of hope and dreams of a future together.  Love looks like arguments that you settled well, and those you didn't, but survived anyway.  Love looks like wrong turns that God brought back full circle.  Love looks like mistakes that helped you learn more about yourself and your husband.  Love looks like the circle of your husband's arms and the imprint of his kiss.  Love looks like tip-toeing by his chair when he has fallen asleep after a long day, and making sure you feed the kids early and wait to eat with him when he's late coming home from work.  Love looks like giving in on little issues and learning to cooperate on larger ones.  Love looks like tears shed out of frustration that you can't seem to understand each other, and tears again when you do finally understand.  Love looks like working it all out through the years, no matter what.

Love cannot advertise itself.  God invented it and showed it to his people all the time.  Giving is love.  Receiving gracefully is love.  Love is a great number of things that never appear in commercials prior to February 14, because no couple shares the same love, and no couple ever will.

Comparing your love and marriage to anyone or anything else will only continue to thwart any forward motion you make.  "If only ..." and "But, what about so-and-so's husband who did ..." and "I wish he would just ..." serve only to compare.  You may definitely have unmet needs, but comparing "theirs and ours" or "hers and mine" for purposes of discovering what's missing in your marriage will never help.  I guarantee that this kind of behavior will serve only to hurt and divide.

Make a deal with yourself this Valentine's Day -- that you will not think about what the day holds, or what you hope for, or what you want, or what might happen.  Take what comes, or what doesn't, and look deeply at what love really is in your heart and marriage.  Pay no attention to advertising, to what you see around town, or to friends' rehashing of the day -- focus on you and yours.

Then, make plans to continue adding to what love looks like for the two of you, every day, no matter what the box on the calendar shows.  Every day can look like Valentine's Day.


Linking up this 13th day of February with:  Wifey Wednesday, Encourage Your Spouse, What I Learned, Domestic Bliss Diaries, Works for Me Wednesday

Love Is Not What You Expect

Love: In the Beginning

Give people the task of remembering first love (the early days of relationship) and find the reward of whimsical, sentimental half-smiles and a faraway gazes. Each one of the people remembering shares a common bond: unexpectedness.  First love comes unexpectedly and develops in unexpected ways -- but just once.
More than two decades ago, I expected to take a photography class with a weekly lab lesson.  I did not expect to fall in love with the lab instructor when our eyes met across a work table.  God had other plans and had paved the way for my husband to teach that lab, which he had not expected to do.  Fate?  No.  God.

Love leads people to participate in life, behave better than they usually do, enjoy every small gesture as if it will happen only once, live in hope of a next meeting, hold the object of affection in high esteem, communicate ravenously, discover new attractions to the other person, perpetuate the positive and overlook the negative, put opinions on hold in deference to forming a closer union, and look for similarities in word, deed, emotion, spirit and thought.

In new love, we try to connect.  We forge paths toward each other.  We bring together all the similarities we can find to increase common ground.  We put energy toward bonding them.  In short frames of time, we attempt to rewire circuitry in ourselves to better match our love interest.  We give the best of ourselves without asking for anything, but most definitely, we receive a return on that investment that comes by way of the other person's behaviors and words.  These things happen, and they feel automatic.

We make changes we don't mind making.  We make changes we don't notice we make.  We change.

We expect nothing from the other person, but cling to the hope that we will continue to receive as much as we give, but have absolutely no reservations about continuing to give.  That ability feels endless.  We will never knowingly conserve it or quit giving.

And we're right.  We don't do it knowingly at all.


Love: Forward to the Now 

After years (a few, several or many) of marital bliss followed by the invasion of reality that every relationship faces, many of us spare the giving because, guess what?  We are human.  We do not have an "endless" button.  The "automatic" of first love has moved toward the "systematic" of learned behaviors -- we focus on the behaviors our spouse has learned ... those which we detest.  Some of us have quit altogether.  And whatever the case, we have done it without knowing it.

Love is not what you expect.  It is not what I expect.  It begins without expectation and without tremendous effort, but it continues only with great expectation and with tremendous effort.

The trouble begins when we focus more on the expectation -- the expectation of what the other person will do.

We focus less on the effort -- the effort we put into the relationship.

As we move through our relationship, we need to reverse those tendencies.  Focus on expecting from ourselves the loving gestures we need to unearth, dust off and begin to give freely again.  Focus on the effort we put into our everyday encounters with our spouse, and into life itself.  Love with purpose.

Love is not a feeling.  Love is a series of gestures, mostly small ones, that require thought, a bit of planning, and a positive attitude.

We see those words all over the Internet and in media of all kinds, and we think, "YES!  I want that!"

We do want that. We want to feel it.  Be the object of it.  Act as the receiver.  Yet, each of us has to die to ourselves and live for God first and then for our spouses, in giving.  Love is not what you expect.


Rewiring Expectations

The rewiring of our expectations happens with our full knowledge, we cannot wait or hope passively.  The negative changes we have grafted or redirected through years with our spouses have happened in an "unknowing" state.  Why?  Because we have learned to cope rather than to address trouble head-on as we travel the road of marriage.  When we rewire around overloaded circuits we create a more mixed-up bundle of wires and the overloads still exist.  They arc and cause breakers to flip, and we flip it back and continue on around the problem, hoping to avoid the wires that cause the problem ... but not knowing which one.

Avoid the guessing.  Don't make one more electrical connection that doesn't serve to light love between you and your husband.

• Pray for open connections.  God has the job of Master Electrician in this area.  He charges no fees and his work is perfect.  He can work miracles you have never imagined.  
• Read all the verses you can find about love.  I don't want to beat I Corinthians 13 into the ground, but for goodness' sake, it's all there in beautiful prose.  The Golden Rule is shorter, and very direct -- do to others (your husband) in the way you would have others do to you.  Treat him the way you want to be treated.  
• Exchange some "Me Time" in favor of "We Time" -- make plans to take care of yourselves as a couple.  Work and play together, plan, hope, dream and expect good things.  We all need to take time to care for ourselves and to have a break once in a while, but balance holds the key here.
• Work toward oneness of *body, mind, spirit and emotion.  *(Physical intimacy feels impossible when you don't feel emotionally attached.  Your husband will feel emotionally attached when you engage with him in body.  We are polar opposites in our wiring on this.  Do what YOU can do to change this aspect of your relationship.  This is the area in which I made my first step -- and the benefits build on themselves).
• Don't expect perfection.  Marriage requires work, sacrifice, selflessness and time.  Some days, we don't feel like working, we don't want to give anything today, we feel selfish and feel pressed for time.  This is where we keep working at it, with no such phrase as "I give up" allowed.  Pray continually.  God will redirect you!
• Remember the good old days.  Memories of first love help us rewind and repeat.  Do this as often as you can because forgetting happens as life takes over and we lose that laser-like focus.
• Build on your successes.  
• Mistakes happen.  Try, try again.
• Focus on the little things.  Eye contact, a touch on the arm, holding hands, a hug, a smile, a little gift, a note on the steering wheel, a text or phone call -- the small things that make people feel noticed.  Do them.  Often.  
• Make it real.  No fake gestures allowed, no forced smiles.  Pray for the things you feel incapable of doing and find that wire coming alive and ready for connection.

With God, all things are possible.  Believe it, pray it, and watch it work.  Soon, you find your unspoken expectations have shrunken to almost unnoticeable levels and your marriage looks better than you have seen it in years.

Love is definitely not what you expect, but it's everything you give.