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

Real Love in Real Life: the Naive Newlywed

For better or for worse.  So far, so good.  I don't see any "worse", we'll keep riding this wave forever.  That's all I see on the horizon.  

In sickness and in health.  Of course!  We'll have our bouts of cold and flu.  Maybe a surgery or two along the way, but we can handle it.

For richer or for poorer.  Since we're both working ... since he/she has such a good job ... since we don't have any big needs we'll be fine on that one.  Most people just don't know how to spend wisely.

'Til death do us part. That's such a long time from now, and we're in it for the long haul.  This one's just a given, right?

"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."  ~~Matthew 19:6

These, in part, are the vows you take when you marry.  If you're young, you tend toward naiveté in what they really mean, yet their overtones give an eternal, "how can we miss" feeling. At this point, you have it all:  love, tenderness, focus, plans, dreams, hopes, happy thoughts and little actual reality.  Most definitely, many people do have a strong sense of reality as they approach the altar, offering their lives to their beloved with all these attributes -- and they already know the score because they have lived a lot more of life (by longevity or by hard hits of reality) than most others have.  I understand that, and I think those people just may have a leg up on the rest of us.  

And then you have the rest of us.  You get the "Naive Newlywed" thing going, just as you have the "Perfect Parenting Plan" that you can so boldly assert (when you don't have kids of our own) at the first sign of a crying child or a red-faced, screaming parent. You, the inexperienced, have it in the bag.

You repeat the vows, knowing in your heart how much you mean them, maybe even writing them yourself to make sure you get the point across.  You get it, already.  You have God on your side, even.  You are good to go.  And so you go on, just like this, for weeks, months, even a few years.  More or less.

And reality hits.  Idiosyncrasies that first appeared interesting but annoy the living daylights out of you.  She squeezes the toothpaste tube in the wrong place.  He slumps in front of the TV all night and doesn't help in the kitchen the way he did when you were engaged.  Both of you pitch tents on opposites sides of the "This Is the Way It Should Be" line in most every aspect of life.  And you differ.  You differ a lot.  You never thought this would happen, and you can see your side so clearly and you try to explain it.  You try to outline your needs, your desires, your wants.  The funny thing about it is that you don't even understand what you're doing: making it all about you.  It feels as if it's about "us", and you can even justify or rationalize it.  The sentence, "If you would only _______  we would be so much happier," always sounds good from the speaker's perspective, but take one turn on the receiving end of that sentence and it's blame, hard and fast.  You aren't making me happy.  I'm standing over here hurting because of you.  If you're not happy, look at yourself and what you're doing to me. We would be happy if you would change.

Now you have moved from Naive Newlywed to Selfish/Self-Righteous Saint without knowing when, how or why.  When you share your troubles with others (not your spouse), you feel vindicated.  Others agree with you, they often share the same list of complaints, and can see your spouse in the light in which you have painted him with vivid detail.  You have started rolling a snowball, and beware. It will gain the size and strength to crush everything.

"That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh." ~~Genesis 2:24

If you read books on marriage and some of the ensuing disappointment after the vows, you come to discover that every couple's story has many similarities.  Your story is really not much different from the couple next to you.  Aside from extreme circumstances (abuse, infidelity/adultery, etc.), couples can almost fill their names into the blanks and sheepishly raise their hands, admitting, "Yes.  This is me/us."  Likewise, even the extreme circumstances fit a textbook outline of marital and personal strife.  Does it help to know we're all in the same boat?  A little.  What we need is someone brave enough, courageous enough, strong enough, selfless enough to get out of that boat and swim for the shore. 

God designed marriage and designed each of us, male and female, to have different physical, mental, and emotional make-up so that we attract each other and support each other in that marriage.  Each of us has strengths and weaknesses augmented by the other, which make a marriage strong.  

"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him" ~~Genesis 2:8

A helpmeet.  Someone to help meet the needs you have, to fill in the blanks in the abilities and talents you don't possess.  Someone to help you grow and learn as a person and as a couple.  Instead, in these modern times you fight for independence, for equal rights and for the easy way. You put down the other person in your mind, actions, or words based on him being different from you.  Her abilities make you feel inferior, and so you feel riled and self-righteous, and rail against her ways.  Tip the iceberg with "feel good" social media postings, forwarded messages, and artwork noting in sum, "Get rid of everything and everyone who doesn't make you happy," and "Follow your heart, it will never lead you astray"," and we see just how selfish the world teaches you to be.  

And you learn.  Fast.  You spiral downward, cutting ties with your mate because you don't want to have to live another day with this or that habit.  It will drive you crazy, and it will not make you happy. You have lost fighting for "us" and have started fighting for "me."  You think love is missing because it is, and you don't know why, but blaming him for not meeting your needs makes the most sense in the selfish/self-righteous world you have built.  That's because you don't even know what love really is.  Here's what it is not:  a feeling.

“Love is not a feeling. Love is an action, an activity. . .Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. . . . love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.....true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, 'Love is as love does'.” 

 ~~M.Scott Peck

This is the pitfall of most marriages in trouble.  Couples search for that loving feeling (now I have the Righteous Brothers singing in my head.  Sorry.) and can't locate it.  People start believing they have fallen out of love.  What they have done, in reality, is fallen out of the practice of loving.  They quit doing all the little things that they did when they first met, and in the first years of marriage when they doted on each other and celebrated everything.  Love is not a feeling.  It is a big bunch of actions and thoughts that don't lie there waiting for an invitation to happen.  You either do or you don't -- the choice is yours.
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Make the choice to love.  Pray. Make the choice to love your spouse. Pray some more.  If you haven't loved in a long time it will lack feeling, but the feeling will grow as you go.  The more you invest of your thought, time and energy, the more you will feel it.  You may have built walls of resentment, as has your spouse, but you will slowly erode them with new energy for "us".  Your spouse may not jump out of the boat with you, but that means you swim all the harder and focus on the shore.  Don't quit, just as you didn't quit when it was all new and fresh. Find energy, use it, renew it.  Love is the kind of energy that grows when you use it, it will not deplete or become old from overuse.  Spare no emotional expense.  Waste that energy!  Don't adopt the mantra, "Go green!" on this one.  Spend, spend, spend ... time, thought, action and HOPE.

Those newlywed vows pale in comparison to the battlefields we have set up in real life.  We don't revisit vows often (and we should).  We don't even know what they really mean (and we should).  We hear them in a wedding ceremony and grow misty-eyed, and sometimes feel pain from falling short ourselves in the purity and focus of those lines.

The key to really loving someone is doing real life with him. People ditch marriages for the "feel good" of infatuation.  Some remain in the shallow end where they can touch the bottom and paddle around easily without risk. They expect instant success after the "I do." The infatuation feelings we have when we first meet omit all the negatives. When the negatives arrive, and they will, you have to hone in on the person you married.  Look for the good things, practice them in your mind, make them grow.  Realize that the little things that irritate you are little, and you would put up with them from most other people.  You would give that much time and patience to others.  Give the same and more to your spouse!

Marriage is for life.  Drop the naiveté which is starry-eyed and short-lived.  Perfection isn't possible, and no marriage fits a movie script.  Omit the selfish and the self-righteous from your day.  Stop sharing with the multitudes (work, friends, extended family) and share with your spouse.  Make real love fit in your real life.  

It can happen for you.