Marriage has kept us perpetually in wonder.
If you’re married, you’ll know that marriage has so much ease and beauty - your striking similarities, the ease of every day rhythms together, the comfort of falling asleep and waking up next to each other. And yet for us, it has been our differences, our tensions, that keep us in awe.
My husband and I are so different, more different than I ever realized while we were dating. I will get an idea and be off and running. Camron, on the other hand, is used to thinking things through and evaluating what to do before acting (how I admire him for that!). Learning not to leave him in the dust has been hard but good for me. I have been learning to slow down, be present, and to think through when to speak and when to stay silent. Adapting to one another’s ways of communicating - and embracing them - that has been hard.
But it is in that tension that the beauty of marriage unfolds - healthy communication brings out vulnerability, growth and, ultimately, real intimacy.
Here’s another way of looking at it. There can be no music without tension. Strings of the guitar and violin have tension and, without it, wouldn’t produce one single sound. But with the tension brings music. It’s the same with marriage. It has been in our differences, in our struggles, showing our real selves, that we have created space for the music of intimacy and honesty to flow out of our relationship.
With intentionality and a willingness to fight for what’s real, to be open and honest, to be gracious with weakness and humble with mistakes… what comes from that leaves us in wonder.
Marriage to Camron is promising my whole self - to come out of hiding, to show not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self - the real me. To let go of my mastery of facade, to let him into the web of my own self deception, and really see me. To give him my best self, and to also give him my worst self. Part of a letter I wrote to my husband captures what I mean perfectly -
This is what I promised.
Not just to love you as my twenty something self. Not just to kiss your young lips, let you hold my young waist, to travel and adventure and dance.
I promised so much more.
I promised you my old self. To kiss your wrinkled cheeks, your weathered lips. To feel like 24 year olds in 70 year old bodies.
I promised not just to travel the word with you, but to stay home with you, dancing around the kitchen while the snow falls outside, reading side by side every morning with peanut butter toast. I promised you my wrinkles, my growing waist, my slower steps.
I promised you my whole self, that somehow we would take hold of time, to enter times swift current, and slow it’s wild torrent with the weight of us.. us all there… us being fully in the moment. I promised to slow and enter the joy with you, enter the pain with you, graciously receive your weaknesses, your dreams, your longings and brokenness.
And somehow, in this ordinary, we have the whole entire world. Every emotion I’ve ever experienced has come to its fullness in this. This huge cosmos-shifting covenant called marriage that we’ve made… to love each other til death.
This life is far too short for all the love I have for you in my heart.
