I remember a time in the first blush of youthful love, when the world was seen by me though rose coloured glasses of infatuation. How easily my mind looks upon my girlish self, describing to my friends how, my beloved and I conjoin so perfectly, how our natures are but one in the same, and how grateful I am that we complete each other so beautifully. I talk of how we share a fidelity in all things how our thoughts so complimentary, our common ground being of course endless.Sitting here pondering the words and beliefs of my youth, I can not help from thinking that I was above all things a idiot....
I can truthfully say I have a very healthy happy marriage to a man that I appreciate much more now then I could have ever appreciated through those so called rose coloured glasses, (also sometimes referred to as blinders) seeing as the boy I saw was merely my own work of hopeful fiction. Somehow I made myself believe, despite all my protestations to the contrary, that all the little annoyances of our dating relationship, would be smoothed away like wrinkles upon a bed spread, by time and my own gentle loving hand.
The problem here was that first and foremost my hand was neither gentle or loving, but more clumsy, and irritating, and before I knew it the bedspread was a crumpled stained smelly mess, filled with dirty dishes, never put away, wet towels upon the floor, and one sided conversations as I peppered him with questions when he got home from work only to be responded to with grunts and occasional one word answers, and I only seemed to be tearing away at in anger. I recall devising all sorts of plans and schemes to change my spouse, and if I felt I was at the end of my creative resources, there was always a friend or two to place another plot within my mind.
He would, or wouldn't do something that would cause me to be upset. I would in turn make a cutting remark, or try one of my many ploys, often to his amazement that there was anything wrong in the first place. He would then leave, and somehow in doing so only proved me in my own mind right. Eventually our marriage became more about revenge then actual love.
How did this all change you may ask? well...I had already cut off my nose to spite my face and was working on gouging out my eyes, when I read a book that basically told me to cut out my tounge instead (metaphorically of course), work on myself and actually try to understand my husband and stop trying to make him a woman, but instead appreciate him as a man. I read this advice and did something I rarely do I followed it and actually tried to change me instead of him. By taking my focuse off my his flaws I began to have eyes to see my poor bewildered husband, I started to relise why he pulled away, from what must have seemed to him a wife with a constant axe to grind and the sharp words to prove it. I was able to see that for years I tore away at this dear mans masculinity, ever willing to show him his faults, while being perfectly unaware of my own.
Beyond becomeing aware of my own personal planks in the eye, I was rewarded for my efforts. When I stopped talking he finally was able to speak.I no longer asked him a thousand questions when he walked in the door, and lo and behold when coversation was not forced upon him he started to want to tell me about his day, and more then that I became to him what I once had been a safe comfortable supportive wife. And our home became happy.
Is my husband perfect well... no of couse not no one is, and do I get frustrated sometimes and forget my own higher ideals, well of course. But all and all I would say our marraige is on steady upward climb higher towards the pefect unity, which will only come on that day when the trump sounds and we are made perfect, by he who always was.
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