Perfect Mate

More often than not, I learn what I believe by listening to myself explain it to others. There’s almost certainly a name for that disorder, I’m just not familiar with it since I’ve never heard myself use it.

Over coffee the other day, I heard myself telling another man what may well be the most significant thing I’ve learned about marriage, indeed, about life from marriage. In our youthful days, we tend to think of marriage as a point of arrival. A point in time in which the person who will make us completely happy finally wises up and decides to share the privilege of our life’s journey with us. Therein lie the seeds of the destruction of most marriages.

In truth, marriage is not a point of arrival. It is a point of departure. The traditional wedding vows hint at that. Most of us need more than a hint. We need a two-by-four between the eyes to get our attention.

Secondly, marriage is not the completion of a journey to discover our perfect mate for life. Marriage is the opportunity, if not the commitment, to learn what it means to become the perfect mate. The reason our mates often piss us off so badly is because they’re just doing their job, giving us the chance to grow up. A process which can only begin once someone has demonstrated to us how much growing up we are yet to achieve. In time, children come along to take up any slack in the process our mates started, the process of learning to face our own immaturity and childishness. That’s another blog, though.

Most marriages won’t survive the unrealistic expectations two people carry to the altar and then spend their best energies putting on each other, starting a week or maybe two after the honeymoon. We get lots of hints throughout our lives that no other person in this world can make us happy. Again, hints rarely work. Too often, over fifty percent of the time in first marriages, even among Christians, it takes the two-by-four of watching of our mate’s butt clear the door on the way to anywhere not with us to get our attention.

Now and then, someone is fortunate enough to actually get to the altar having already learned not to demand of anyone what only God can give the human soul: joy, and its third cousin twice removed, happiness. The fact is, if we don’t arrive at the altar fundamentally at peace with ourselves, we’ll more likely than not spend the rest of our lives trying our best to make the unfortunate soul who put their clothes in our closet miserable with us. Misery doesn’t love company because misery can’t love, only destroy. Like C.S. Lewis, I think that hell will be the place where those who choose to go there discover just how alone they’ve always been. Is there any worse hell than loneliness? If we aren’t good company at the altar, there’s nothing our mate can do to change that, other than prove to us what we never could accept about ourselves, our own lonely misery.

That’s because, long before marriage exposes any weakness in our mate, it exposes us for who we are. Our mate’s inability to make us happy simply provides the best reflection of our personal misery. If, in fact, if we did make a poor choice in a life’s mate, that only tells us more about ourselves than it does the one we chose to marry.

The corollary must also be true. If our choice of mates exposes us for who we are then I must be a much better man than I give myself credit for being. My wife is the best human being, the best Christian and the best friend I know, and, as she grows older, more and more the most beautiful person I ever laid eyes on (Thanks, Buddy Griffeth!). I must be something myself, right?

Now and then, I find myself listening to what I was saying out loud at the altar. Truth is, I wasn’t listening to me. I was too busy getting a buzz out of listening to Nancy spout her undying pledge of faithfulness and love to me. Wow! What a buzz! I can still feel it when I take the time to listen again. I’ve been learning since then that I wasn’t having an out-of-body experience at the altar. I was there, too. I should have been listening to me, too!

Marriage offers a much broader life lesson, too. Life’s happiness is not shaped out of what others give us. It is shaped within, out of the unspent fuel used to give ourselves away to others. Joy and happiness are the soul energy that flow back to us as we’ve worked at being the best person we can be, no matter how truly rotten others may prove to be. God’s greatest gifts come in the form of those God sends our way who are patient enough to join our journey with us and who keep giving us one opportunity after another to grow up.